PATCH ADAMS AND OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY
For this week's special blog post, we had to find a portrayal of our chosen career in popular culture and discuss the cultural assumptions made about our job in that portrayal, as well as how popular culture views our job and the people who work in it. I chose the movie Patch Adams. Although it is not specifically about occupational therapy, I found that it shared many similarities. In this movie, a young and troubled man named Hunter Adams admits himself into a mental institution. Because of his experiences there, Adams commits himself to becoming a doctor and later attends medical school. Once in medical school however, Adams is disgusted by the way that patients were so "coldly" treated which in turn "alienates" the patients from their caregivers. What happens throughout the rest of the movie is what I find to be similar to occupational therapy. Adams is determined to heal his patients through laughter and provide them emotional relief. He "clowns around" with his patients and gets to know them on a personal level which lifts the moral of both the patients and the hospital staff. I find this similar to occupational therapy because throughout therapy, occupational therapist have to come up with new and sometimes unusual ways to help heal their patients and while doing so build a strong relationship with them as well. Unfortunately in the movie, Adams' unorthodox ways of treating patients is not widely accepted by the other professionals in the field, who later try to bar him from practicing medicine.
Through this portrayal, I found that they are trying to show that patients need more than just medicine and tests. They need laughter and love. In this movie, the patients and hospital staff love Adams and the way he treats them, but the "higher up" professionals that he was earlier disgusted by for being only cold and clinically professional with their patients, do not approve of his unusual practices. The cultural assumptions that can be made about Patch Adams are occupational therapy are that sometimes treatments are just plain unusual and can seem like they are not even treatments at all. But, these unusual practices can work very well and help the patient both physically and mentally even though they are not the "professional" ways in which people are used to.
WORKS CITED
"Patch Adams: Synopsis." Fandango. AMG. n.d. Web. 24 March 2013.
I watched this movie last year and I absolutely loved it. Patients have to deal with their illness and often stress when they are being treated in a hospital and I think it helps them cope and relax when they have someone, such as a doctor, to deeply care for them and even make them laugh on occasion. Do you think you will mimic the practices of Patch Adams when you treat your future patients?
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