I am not sure if the title of this post makes any sense but what I am trying to say is that I am itching to get back into the clinic. All of my athletes(patients) are on summer break and I won't be dealing with any athletes for another two weeks or so. I love being an athletic trainer and I have been reading/watching/learning a lot this summer that I want to use to advance my skills as a clinician.
With no athletes to fix I have resorted to offering a helping hand to others outside of my athletic training world. I work as a barista for a part-time summer job to help foot some of my bills and fortunately for me over the past week this job has been a source for me to help some people with musculoskeletal issues.
The first issue was with a police officer that stops in and buys coffee from me every Friday. For the past two months or so he has been wearing a strap on his forearm for what he assumed was tennis elbow. He isn't an athlete and doesn't do much outside of his job besides work in his lawn. He mentioned that this issue has even caused him problems with gripping items. He had not bothered to go and see anyone about his issue and his constant use of a forearm brace was getting on my nerves because such an object should never be used as permanent fix. I asked him if he was willing to try a few things to see if I could help him with his arm.
I had a hunch that I could probably use some repeated end-range resets a la Dr. Religioso. I asked him to do both wrist flexion and extension and noticed that he was very limited in wrist extension and he told me that it felt tight and he was always stretching this way. This and the fact that he had almost full wrist flexion made me decide that his direction of preference just might be repeated wrist flexion. He performed 3 sets of 15 end-range wrist flexion "resets" and had marked improvement with wrist extension and I asked him to repeat some gripping tasks. He remarked that he was pain free and removed the forearm brace. I instructed him that he would need to repeat this once an hour to keep these changes. Hours later, before my shift ended he stopped back in to thank me and he had not put the forearm brace back on yet. I am going to see him again this Friday and I hope to get an update on how he is doing then.
The second issue was a text message from my father that I received while at work. He texted me telling me that the heel of his foot had been bothering him lately, especially after sitting for long periods of time. I was thinking that this sounded like plantar fasciitis/osis and I quickly shot him an email with two of my youtube videos. I sent him a video of how to assess his ankle mobility (dorsiflexion), and my video of how to do end-range plantar flexion "resets" to increase ankle mobility. I asked him to do a few sets of the ankle exercise from the second video and tell me if there was any immediate difference. He texted me back informing me that it was immediately improved and he was very thankful. I texted him today and he tells me that it is getting better and better every day and that the exercises are helping. Both of these cases are more evidence to me that "rapid onset of symptoms can = rapid resolution of symptoms" in the case of non-traumatic injuries.
In the end, these two instances just made me even more anxious to get back into the Athletic Training Clinic (We need to stop saying training room or even the seldom used athletic training room). I am very excited for my second year as a graduate assistant athletic trainer and I feel that I have a much better sense of internal direction as a clinician compared to one year ago. I am very excited to attend a seminar on the Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA) this fall and add that to my repertoire as well.
*UPDATE* Here is a blog post and video of just the ankle reset that I mention in this post. This was made by Dr. E himself!
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