I have to say that becoming an Occupational Therapist was one of the best decisions of my life. What an amazing field. It really is tailored to those special people who see the world in the open way we do.
Occupational Therapists I've known are some of the most interesting, dynamic and creative people I've ever met. It was with the understanding that we were something special in healthcare that accounted for our value and place at the table. Still we struggled with the difficulty of being relatively unknown.
In conversations, where introductions turned to talk of careers, I am still surprised if someone has heard of Occupational Therapy and then more surprised if they have an understanding of what we can do. Many of those have a family member who is an OT. For the others I am always happy to explain the very important role we fill in the healthcare system and people feel my excitement at the potential of such a field. But still I wonder why these ideas have not caught on.
In many ways the ideas have caught on, PTs are writing functional notes and using simulated functional tasks to work on balance, etc. Recreational Therapists have added functional aspects to their care. I recently read a paper from the Netherlands which recommends a Functional Therapy program and describes it as PT with a "systematic application of functional physical therapy", check it out at (http://www.ptjournal.org/cgi/content/short/81/9/1534 ). The results showed that the physical performance was the same between groups but that the subjects of the "functional physical therapy" program were more able to do functional tasks. This type of paper might have been written 70 years ago by an OT.
It has been a long time since I and others have thought of this type of change. I wrote a paper for a Canadian Trade Journal for Occupational Therapists in 1995 suggesting that we change our name to Functional Therapy. It turns out that I have eventually taken my own advice to protect the name for those therapists who might wish to enhance their certification by qualifying for the additional designations of Registered Functional Therapist RFT (TM) or Registered Functional Therapy Assistant RFTA (TM). While explaining OT I've often given the 10 second version that we might be better called "Functional Therapists". It often suffices to give a better impression of the field without even going much further. Now we can and it's protected to members of our Trade Organization called the "American League of Functional Therapists" or "ALOFT".
I hope you will consider this as a positive step to enhance your own certification and to allow the use of the more easily understood term of Functional Therapy.
Respectfully yours, Ed Kaine, OTR/L, RFT
Registered Funcitonal Therapist RFT
http://www.functionaltherapist.org/
Comments?: Contact us at RegisteredFunctionalTherapist@gmail.com
Functional Therapy... the Next Generation of Occupational Therapy!
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