Over the years speaking with families and patients, its become clear that many do not know what the main therapies do or how they can make a major impact in peoples lives. The 3 main types are Occupational, Physical and Speech therapy. I have decided to break it down for all of you to help clarify the roles that each discipline play in improving quality of life and maintaining independence.
Occupational Therapy
This is the therapy that seems to have the most confusion surrounding it. I’ve heard people say they think that OTs do anything from specializing in job training or workman’s comp!
Generally speaking, they actually are the experts at what are called ADLs – Activities of Daily Living. This includes everything from getting dressed, brushing your teeth, feeding yourself, taking a shower, using the bathroom or washing up. I like to joke that they are the Professor Gadget of the therapies as they have a multitude of tools that can help make putting on socks to eating dinner so much easier to accomplish.
Like Physical therapists they are also good at assessing home environments to make recommendations or different adaptations that can make life for your loved one better. While ADL’s are OTs “bread and butter”, they also can assess memory deficits and work with increasing range of motion (ability to move a joint) in an area that has become difficult for a person to move (ex. shoulder, hand, etc.).
Physical Therapy
This is my discipline by trade and it also plays a major role in being able to improve or maintain function.
The main tenets of physical therapy deal with mobility, balance and strength. For example, a typical treatment session might include: strengthening exercises to make it easier to stand up, techniques for safety and improving the ability to stand up, walking using an assistive device (walker, cane, etc.), balance training to decrease fall risk and setting up a tailored exercise program for your loved one.
By addressing areas of weakness, balance deficits as well as proper safety instruction and evaluation, PTs can improve function and safety while improving a persons quality of life by maintaining their independence. Like OTs, PTs are experts in home assessments and evaluation and can be an important allies in maintaining your loved ones quality of life in their home.
Speech Therapy
Another often misunderstood therapy is Speech, or SLPs (Speech Language Pathologists). The name itself only tells part of the story though. Yes, they are able to work with improving speech itself (I had a stutter until I was 7 when a SLP was able to fix it in a few sessions!), but they also can help with memory tasks and swallow function as well.
While a loved one with a cognitive decline might not be able to reverse that degeneration in the brain, there are some very good strategies for remembering or retaining information that SLPs are able to employ that I have seen work wonders with people.
Another important part of dealing with memory that SLPs can do is to work on “medication management”. This means that they will work with your loved one on making sure that they remember to take the right pill at the right time especially if they are doing their own medications.
One more major area that SLPs can help is dealing with dysphagia, which is the ability to properly swallow foods or liquids without choking/aspirating. As people with dementia progress through the disease process, it is common for the swallow function to decline which can result in aspiration (food/liquid ending up in lungs) and pneumonia.
SLPs can work on improving the strength of the muscles involved in swallowing as well as recommend the proper consistency of the diet and liquid in order to decrease risk for hospitalization.
Wrapping Up
The 3 main therapies above can work together to improve the quality of life and safety for your loved one in their homes.
Ok, all of this info is helpful, but how do I do it??
The first step would be to get an order for therapy from their primary physician.
If you are just looking for some physical therapy to do a little touch up on Mom or Dad’s mobility, then an outpatient clinic might be the right choice. They can be found all over the place and likely located in a strip mall near your home right now. Just make a call to the clinic once you have the Physicians order and set up and appointment and away you go!
If getting out of the home can be difficult or you would like to have sessions specifically tailored to your home environment then Home Health therapy is the thing for you.
There are many home health companies that provide therapy as well as nursing assistance so this will likely be most people’s go-to. All 3 therapies are very prevalent in home health and give the added bonus of being able to see what each person’s home environment is like, thereby being able to tailor therapy to fit each person’s needs perfectly.
Getting the therapies your loved one needs is very important for their balance, ADLs, and memory and swallowing. They will give your loved one a better quality of life, which is what all of us as caregivers want for those we care about.
