Clinic Placement

Date: 10th Nov

Location: Marjon Clinic

Duration:3 Hours (3pm-6pm)

Supervisors: Alex, Mike

What happened?

I didn’t have a patient for the first hour so my supervisor went over some rehab techniques for a lateral ankle sprain. Specifically pro-reception work as I have an ongoing client recovering from a ATFL sprain. I learnt A lot of new ideas on advanced exercises (progression) on the bosu ball. and how incorporating plyometrics work as well will help to enhance proprioception. I felt like this was very beneficial and I got lots of new ideas for progression exercises for my patients. My favourite one that I learnt was playing a band around the athletes shin and pulling against for resistance when they are trying to balance. I have done a lot of balance work on my own to do with my dancing as balance was a big part of dancing, especially in ballet. Because of this I came up with more profession ideas for balance work, especially for professional dancers who commonly have very good balance. So I came up with ideas incorporating dance specific movements. I mostly came up with rises ( on the balls of the feet) exercises whilst moving the free limb into dance positions. I believe this was a really interesting thing for me to explore as I am interested in working specifically with dancers in the future.

For the next hour I had a patient with pain in their lower back. I went through a whole assesment of the back and hip. No serious injury was detected however, the patient had tightness of hip flexors and weakness of the glutes, abdominals and hamstrings. This is the pelvic cross syndrome which is one of the most commonly seen muscle imbalances in lower back pain. I was able to give this patient hip flexor stretching exercises. I feel I demonstrated the exercises well.  I also got the patient to perform the stretch to make sure they’re using the right technique to not further injure themselves, which I think is important for both the patients confidence and hopefully will encourage them to do the stretches more at home. The patients posture, specifically correction of their forward head posture was addressed. I was able to demonstrate neck movement exercises well and got my patient to again repeat and I believe they enjoyed learning new techniques. I feel this all went well.

The last hour my patient had a tennis elbow injury that had been diagnosed previously by another clinician. The patient had been given isometric exercises and had been resting. It has been proven that shoulder stabilisation and strengthening exercises are best for recovery of tennis elbow. i went through safely 3 exercises. Open book, prone lying arm adduction and lateral elbow external rotation. the patient was happy. I tested the patient for ROM of the shoulder to compare next week after them doing the exercises at home. I believe everything went well.

Overall it was a good session at the clinic. I believe I conducted myself in a good manner, safely giving treatment and gained knowledge from both my supervisors and research.