the miscellaneous, unexpected things

Here’s a collection of things I saw along the way that surprised me or that I found interesting and forgot to share.

1) the shoes - or lack thereof. In Thailand, people mostly wear slide type sandals, even if they’re working construction. This carries over into the PT setting, where therapists are either in slide sandals or wearing no shoes at all, socks optional for either of those options. Every so often there will be a therapist wearing tennis shoes, but it was pretty rare. Only the day we did PT in Fitness was that the expectation. For peds, barefoot was the expectatiob. So for the majority of the internship, I wore socks and sandals to treat patients. They have a shoe rack outside treatment rooms with sandals for everyone to wear into treatment and since they were everyone’s sandals, I felt better keeping the socks on. Super different than back home.

2) gait belts. Gait belts run the PT world back home, but not so much here. I already didn’t love guarding patients in the shoewear provided- not a lot of grip on those things- but I especially didn’t like not having a gait belt for safety. I finally saw a gait belt on my last day in the clinic, at the Neuro department. It was the heaviest duty gait belt I’ve ever seen (pic below) and had nice little handles and everything. So it seems like they won’t use a gait belt until it’s really, really necessary, but when they do, it’ll definitely get the job done.

3) Electrical stimulation. A super common, often used modality back home, but approached differently here. We have big machines back home, but their units are all the portable kind and I only saw them use FES. Their pain-relief modalities seemed limited to heat and ice. I did learn about a different kind of electrical stimulation, and the therapists told me the machine was from Thailand. I talked to a couple different therapists and a few students, all at different times, about this and the one comment they all said was that it was actually painful. So that’s an interesting twist and I didn’t have time to volunteer to see just how painful, but it did sort of look scary. You’re supposed to wet a cloth and put it around the probe-looking things, and then put it on the muscle. Definitely not the e-stim I’m familiar with.