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.
This is going to be a very different journal for me. I am going to write about an evaluation experience that actually happened today. I have recently completed two evaluations of the ankle, and for some reason I just forgot everything. I don’t know if I was just thinking that it was the ankle and the evaluation would be easy, however, I really actually struggled through the evaluation. This was able to open my eyes to how I am supposed to perform an evaluation. I would skip steps throughout my evaluation process just trying to go straight to special tests because I thought that’s the only way to diagnosis an injury. However, that is not the case, and I am really glad I went through this mistake. Today, I was presented a patient who was having back pain. I first thought to myself, man this is going to be hard, but actually I was able to simplify the situation and come out on top. I used my previous experiences to use the history questions as my most important part of my evaluation. This allowed me to already start brainstorming about what injuries this could be. After listening to the history questions, I then took the questions and applied them to my palpation process. The patient’s symptoms presented a burning pain shooting up the back and pain along the erector spinae. After, I moved to range of motion I learned the patient could not perform trunk flexion, extension, or rotation. I used this information to think about the injuries that can affect these motions. In the back of my mind I was thinking this could have something to do with the discs. However, I did not want to think this was the only injury it could be. I wanted to keep an open mind throughout my evaluation process because I want to make sure I have ruled as much out as I can to be confident on my diagnosis. After finishing my evaluation, I came to the conclusion that there could potentially be a herniated disc. However, the patient felt very tight. So, Melissa and I decided that we were going to treat the symptoms, and reevaluate the patient in a couple of days. This experience has really spoke volumes to me. I have realized that just following an evaluation sheet is not the way to go. I need to start expanding my evaluations skills to not perform like a book.
1 Comment
BFunk
11/28/2018 06:28:57 am
Oh my. I'm glad you had the opportuntity to open your eyes to the error of your process. Special/stress/diagnostic tests should be used to rule in or out, there's a reason we integrate those mostly at the end of the process. Those other steps are critical, there are key elements to the process you can only get from a good history. Really, you should start formulating your differentials from the moment you see the injury occur or begin the eval process. So, glad you had this eye opening experience, but sad that you had gotten this far with thinking it was all about the tests.
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Reflective JournalsThese journal entries express my experience as an athletic training student Archives
April 2019
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