What I do in my occupational therapy work.

After starting my Pain Management in Malaysia blog, I decided to start working on one that would be more specific and cover the kind of work that I'm actually doing. While I do have a fair bit of clients who need to know how to deal with pain (and having a blog would save time tremendously as I can just email or whatsapp them the relevant links to whatever complaints they may have), I am not exactly an occupational therapist who specialises in pain. It is necessary for occupational therapists to have skills to deal with pain, but typically pain comes as a by-product of some other condition. The pains I would typically see in my clients - office workers aged 20s-40s, are a little bit different from say, the pain an elderly gentleman with stroke and diabetes aged 70s would experience. The aches and pains an office-based worker would experience are also a little bit different from the aches and pains of an athlete. I'd still keep my pain management blog though (have plenty of exciting posts lined up which I feel my clients would find useful) and have guest occupational therapy bloggers cover the other aspects of pain I don't quite have experience with myself. So if you're an occupational therapist who is skilled in a particular type of pain management, feel free to drop me a line and volunteer to be a guest blogger. :) I'll probably get my clients to guest blog too. After all, clients are the experts of themselves, and we health professionals are supposed to be serving *them* anyways.

In the very short time (close to 3 years now) since I started my occupational therapy practice working with adults who have obesity-related conditions (weight management, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, polycystic ovarian syndrome), I realised that these conditions often manifested alongside a bunch of other health conditions that I would also need to help them address in order to address the weight-related problems they were originally referred to me for - chronic pain, sleep problems, stress, etc. And these health problems my clients were facing were very much related to their work. In summary, their work was affecting their health.

I was also getting referrals where clients' health affected their work: diminished productivity due to health problems for example, and took on a few pro-bono clients whose health which had deteriorated because of the kind of risks they were exposed to at work (and these risks are a little less obvious than you would think, the impacts from these risks a little bit more significant than you would expect) to the point where they were unable to go to work anymore. 

All in a day's work for an occupational therapist right? Especially that of a "return to work" type of occupational therapist). But I'm not really a "return to work" occupational therapist - I'm more like a "help you stay at work and keep your job while keeping you healthy" occupational therapist. Clients should be seeing me before they need to be "returned" to work. By the time they need to be "returned" to work, sometimes one would think that they would do better not returning to their original work but doing something else to generate an income instead. That's just my personal opinion really.

So yes, that kind of summarises the sort of work that I do. If you're one of those people (ahem, yes - many of you Malaysians on my Facebook friend list, I'ma gonna tag you all!) whom I have spent a significant time trying to explain what I do in my day-to-day work to you, is this writeup simple enough to understand?