Healthy Aging
Could occupational therapy enhance your quality of life?
Get your life back by learning new ways to do once-simple activities that are now challenging.
Image: McIninch/Thinkstock
Occupational therapy (OT) is well known as part of recovery for people who've had a stroke or surgery: it helps them relearn everyday activities and adjust to doing them differently. But OT can also make a difference for people struggling with the physical changes that accompany aging, such as hand arthritis or hip or knee problems that cause pain and problems with mobility. "We teach people how to approach activities differently so they can keep pain under control while doing what they want to do. It's all about maintaining independence," says Allison Pinsince, an occupational therapist at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
How OT works
Multiple approaches
Sometimes that adjustment involves training you to use adaptive equipment to make it easier to do everyday activities. "There are so many tools, it can be overwhelming if you don't know exactly what you need," says Pinsince.
For example, there are tools to help you eat if you have trouble gripping: specially shaped utensils, and bowls and plates curved to help you load food onto a fork. There's adaptive equipment to help in the bathroom (shower chairs, raised toilet seats, and aids for hygiene) and to help you dress (long-handled equipment to put on socks and shoes, shirt buttoners, and elastic shoelaces).
OT may also include an exercise program to strengthen muscles around a joint that's so painful it keeps you from performing an activity. The takeaway is that you may not need to suffer. "We can help you do some of the meaningful activities of life more easily," says Pinsince.
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