Brian Ross English 151 Ms. Mudd May, 6 2010
Helping hands?
Critical Preface You got hurt. You just had surgery, now what? The next step in the health care profession after incidents such as these is rehabilitation. This is where people turn to Physical Therapy for a faster and better recovery. A therapist is known as a movement specialist that helps recovering patients from any type of accident or injury. Rehabilitation usually ranges from any part of your body from head to foot. There are many techniques and methods for the patient to use while attempting to get back to full health. The profession has been an ever growing field of work for hospital systems since the end of WWII. During its growth, new branches such as Massage therapy and Occupational therapy, have gone hand in hand with the medical fields. My major is Pre-Physical Therapy, so to look into this topic a little more about how the job is done will help me answer some of my questions that I have about its uses. We have all had some type of personal experience where we either got hurt or needed surgery. Resulting from this, doctors have probably requested you to go into a type of rehab center so they can evaluate your progression in the healing process. The problem that has slowly crept up in studies today is that of the benefits of this line of work. Now this is where I would like to find out the answers to some of my questions: (1) Are all types of health related injury actually worthwhile for a therapist to do work on? (2) Is there solid beneficial factor to the patients’ participation of the therapy? (3) Is there actual data to show patients improvement with their problem? And (4) Is there a mental aspect of the healing process? These questions need to be answered, not only for me but for others, so that they too can see my results of the research. I have currently been looking over research during late April, and early May 2010, ranging over many topics on this subject. I have viewed academic journals that I will be using as my sources for my annotated bibliography. After viewing many sources for my annotated bibliography I will be mainly using academic journals. I did find all of my sources to be helpful to obtain the answers I was looking for in my work.

Annotated Bibliography
Carpentier, Jim. “Therapy Can AND CANNOT DO.”American Fitness 28.1 (2010): 52-53. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 April. 2010. This article covers the Massage side of therapy. In the article Carpentier clearly states on both sides of the argument of what massage therapy can and cannot do. We learn that there is an”Sports-Message” that is only 15-30 minutes in length, used for one or two main parts of your body while the “Swedish-Massage” 30 minutes to an hour in length will go over your entire body. It is noted that positive results from these two types of massage will (1) Alleviate pain in patients. (2) Lowers stress hormones. (3) Lessens depressive symptoms. (4) boost immune system. (5) improve muscle flexability and recovery. To the other side of massage therapy, the disadvantage can come from different directions. To say you got freshly hurt, massage would only worsen the injury that occurred by aggravation. Also any type of massage is proven to not help protect against injury. Having an article being up to date such as this makes it worthwhile and valid for a good source to use.
“People With Diabetes Benefit From Exercise at Work.” Magazine of Physical Therapy 12.10 (2004): 69-70. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2. May. 2010.
This article I found to be quite interesting when looking up research for this topic. I can across this article about an ongoing research study with people diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes. After many clinical hours of work lead researcher Gang Hu of the National Public Health Institute has found a link between diabetes and working. While around 3,000 people attended this study, sadly only 1,400 lived to see the results. Therapists took measures of peoples work field and their blood count levels. As the study showed participants who were linked to have a “light” job such as office work, were reported with higher rates of health problems. The people in the middle reported moderate. But the workers who had “active” jobs ended with the best health. Once the numbers were all calculated and straightened out, findings shown that with just a little more effort in the work field will result in a better record of health. Therapists who helped conduct the study also saw less conditions of linked stress and pains with patients how had more active job. While taking this all in this helped me realize that this article was good because it had reliable numbers and facts from great sources.