Internship 2: Nova Care

This Internship has made it more apparent to me how attitudes and perspective can influence healing. There have been several experiences this summer that have brought this to my attention.

The first experience I had with this involved the patient’s perception of me. This was early on in my internship and I was still pretty nervous about doing evaluations, especially when it came to explaining what I thought to be wrong and what we planned to do to address the issues found. This along with the fact that my CI was teaching me a new technique to provided the patient, led the patient to gain the perspective that I was not as qualified to treat her as the other employees and so she requested to be treated primarily by others. As the patient was being treated she continued to have questions and in one particular situation I felt very confident about the advice I could give her and when I did, there was trust and a new perspective built. From then on, the patient at times would seek my advice along with everyone else’s.

Another example involves the comparison between two patients and their attitudes. Both patients came to be treated after having surgery on one of their knees. The first patient actually has gone through several revisions, but throughout everything continues to have motivation to make progress and get back to the things he did prior to his injury. He focuses on his gains and the small, yet continual progress he is making. His attitude makes him fun and easy to work with and I find myself excited to work when he is there. On the other hand, the other patient has a poor attitude; he rolls his eyes when we give him instruction and education on how to progress, he never smiles and he complains of pain constantly. Although he has made gains since starting PT with us, he is behind in his progress because he focuses on his pain rather than his gains; this makes it very hard and frustrating to work with him. These two drastic examples have shown me the power of attitudes in the healing process.

If I think back onto the patient’s I have worked with this summer, I can see this in each one of them. I have worked with a person who has had many difficulties including physical and mental issues and although their progress was slow and small, they had a positive attitude and the ability to see those gains and be grateful. Another individual has had low back problems and is over weight. This person realizes that they need to loose some weight, but has an aversion to “breathing hard.” This perspective holds this person back from achieving the goals that he/she has and caused his/her progress to be so slow that it took several months to progress, when it could have taken less time.

No matter how much knowledge I pour out onto some individuals, it won’t help them nearly as much as it could because of their attitudes. If a person does not buy into or work at the things that I teach them, they won’t succeed nearly as much as they would if they did. It is like the old saying goes, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I have learned that an individual’s attitude is out of my hands.