-: My name is Mary Mikutowski.
I'm a Physical Therapy student at the U of M.
So Physical Therapy, as a therapist we are the movement
specialist, so if you have an injury, whether you're an
athlete or a geriatric population or if you have a stroke
or brain injury, anything like that, we're the people
who get you moving and getting you back to normal function
and having the best quality of life that you can.
On a daily basis, we're supposed to block off our day
from eight to five.
Now we don't have class that full time usually
but in the afternoon sometimes we might have either
clerkship experiences where we get to go into clinics
and either do, like help residents in a nursing home
or skilled nursing facility
with their home exercise programs.
In my second year, we've been going into clinics
and doing the evaluations on patients
and getting practice that way before we go full time
in our third year into the clinics.
It kind of depends on where they're starting at
and every patient is different.
You might have two patients with the same diagnosis
but based on their motivation level, their prior
experience with injury and pain, each person might
have a little bit different therapy and plan of care.
But you might start with an evaluation just to see
what's wrong and see based on what their symptoms
are presenting it with if that's actually the source
of their problem or if we need to address something else.
And then we also address and see if they need to be
referred to someone else, a different care provider.
But once we get the diagnosis and create a plan of care
then we start with some maybe like strengthening
or range of motion or maybe some mobilizations
that I would assist with and stuff like that.