Neuro Note 3

I watched a ted talk titled Simple hacks for life with Parkinson’s, by Mileha Soneji. In this talk, Soneji talks about her view of Parkinsons from watching her uncle’s progression with the disease. She talked of how he used to be active and involved in activities with her family and how this slowly decreased after his diagnosis with Parkinsons. Soneji then begins to talk about things that she has designed to simply the life of those with parkinsons. She began by making a coffee cup that is tremor proof and keeps coffee contained within the cup. What really stood out to me about this product was that she made sure it was a cool looking product and that it wasn’t labeled as a parkinsons patient product. This allows the client to use the cup and not stand out as being “different”. Soneji claims that both empathy and curiosity are necessary to find solutions to helping clients with parkinsons adapt to their surroundings and barriers. She continues to work on this and find ways to simplify things such as walking for her uncle. From this ted talk, I learned that getting a full understanding of the occupational profile is essential to helping our clients. Soneji did this to better help her uncle, and she isn’t even an occupational therapist. Understanding the things the client does on a day to day basis, as well as things that they find valuable and meaningful is the first step to building a treatment plan. Next, Soneji observed her uncle in his everyday environment to find things that he had the most difficulty with. This is also something that can be useful to my future practice as an occupational therapist. Sometimes observation can provide more information that just an interview. Soneji suggests that breaking big problems down can help to find simple smaller solutions to those big problems, and I feel like that can really relate to many activities that we may incorporate into our future work. This ted talk can be accessed at the link below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5M3J_FHXY

TED. (2016, March 31). Simple hacks for life with Parkinson’s | Mileha Soneji. Retrieved August            19, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5M3J_FHXY