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.
Throughout this past week I was responsible for making a clinical decision on an athlete with low back pain. The athlete had been seeing Bre previously with this pain while she was cheerleading in the fall, but had not been seen since then. So I had heard about her tight back muscles from Bre before. I first began by evaluating the athlete. My history include that the athlete is currently playing volleyball, and she is practicing 4 days a week. She is a libero, and reports most of her back pain is when she is bending over waiting for a serve or a pass, but no pain when actually passing the ball. She also has muscle spasms randomly in her back. However, she reports no radicular pain. Throughout my evaluation, I first was able to help correct her posture. She had a forward shoulder posture and slumped her back. I explain to her correct posture, which could help relieve some of her pain. Throughout my palpation process, I felt that her paraspinals were very tight bilaterally. Next, she had full lumbar ROM. There was no positive special test. Bre asked me what type of treatment I wanted to do for the athlete, and I chose to perform pre-mod stimulation on her back. I chose this because I wanted to target the pain. I did 0-150 beats frequency for 7 minutes (because that was how long we could be in the clinic before we needed to leave to be present for the soccer game). This experience was really helpful to me because it was in front of an athlete I knew well in high school, so I didn’t want to sound like I had no idea what I was doing. I was also nervous because I wanted to prove to Bre my knowledge. I knew exactly which modality I wanted to use, however, I just needed to get over my stage fright. This did help towards my clinical goal because I was able to run through the back muscles/anatomy, special tests, and performing an evaluation which is one of my goals in my book! Its always helpful to have different kinds of evaluations to perform because I know the more I do the more I learn. Lastly, I was able to get 10 masteries this week.
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Reflective JournalsThese journal entries express my experience as an athletic training student Archives
April 2019
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