Journals
These journals reflect my weekly experiences as an athletic training student. Each journal reflects either an actual patient contact experience, or something I am working on in my athletic training courses.
One challenging evaluation I had was determining which muscle was strained in the hamstring. I was able to go through the entire evaluation to figure out if something was wrong and narrowed it down to it being a muscle injury. However throughout this evaluation I kept trying to think about what special test I could perform for a hamstring. I am used to following a textbook about certain injuries, however, there isn’t special tests one can perform show a positive or negative sign about a manual muscle test. I was able to go through ROM, and when I got to my strength testing I really struggled with remembering how to isolate certain muscles in order to bilaterally test it to see if that muscle is the one that is injured. I think what was so challenging about the evaluation is that I got really nervous when I couldn’t remember the origin and insertion of the muscles of the hamstring and just began shutting down. So I wasn’t able to isolate the muscles to figure out which muscle was strained. However, this was a very good lesson I learned, and I am really glad this evaluation happened early in my learning process. I am so used to going off of special tests to perform in order to get that a positive result. This evaluation really opened up my insight to how I should be performing my evaluations. I now spend more time focused on the history portion of my evaluations. By figuring out exactly where the pain is located allows me to figure out if its bone, ligament, or a muscle, which helps me to begin my evaluation. I used to begin by thinking “oh this injury is the shoulder and let me do as many special tests as I can think of,” however, that’s not how it should be at all. I have been able to fix my evaluation skills and make less effort in performing as many tests as I can and certain things I should do for what the patient is describing. I also figured out how important ROM and manual muscle testing can be. This helps to figure out what is weak bilaterally and use it throughout my evaluation. This has influenced me to take my time at the beginning of an evaluation to allow myself to figure out the bulk of the history and where the patients weaknesses are located. There have been multiple evaluations where I do not even perform a special test because I am able to listen to the patient’s history and mechanism of injury to figure out it is just a muscle/muscle strain injury. This week I was able to get 4 attempts!
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Reflective JournalsThese journal entries express my experience as an athletic training student Archives
April 2019
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