Call Us at Live Chat. Search for Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Catherine University. Posted on February 24, By St. Get Started Today. Enter Your First and Last Name. First Name. Last Name. Email Address. Phone Number. Zip Code. Get Started. Related Posts. View all in OT vs PT. The biggest difference between occupational therapy and physical therapy is that occupational therapy focuses on increasing independence in daily activities, while physical therapy focuses on the mechanics of how the body moves.
The education requirements for occupational therapy will be changing on July, 1 After this date, anyone who wants to become an OT is going to be required to get a doctorate, just like PT source. When changes have happened like this in the past, everyone who got their education before the date the change was implemented was grandfathered in. My particular OT program was 2 years of classes and 6 months of fieldwork experience. This structure and timeframe can vary depending on your program.
A doctorate in PT generally takes 3 years. These can add an additional months depending on the one you choose source. Even though licensing and continuing education requirements can be time consuming, they can be important for you to stay sharp as an OT or PT.
Physical therapy focuses on body mechanics and occupational therapy focuses on helping individuals master and achieve independence with daily activities. The goal is the same, to get down the hall, but the PT is focused on the mechanics of walking, while the OT is focused on the activity of arriving to dinner. While it may look the same from the surface, both are helping someone walk down the hall, the goals behind them are different, which is key.
An OT may decide that the best way to get to dinner is with a walker or wheelchair, while the PT will only want to walk, regardless of whether they make it to the dining room or not. OTs and PTs work very closely together. In a lot of settings, they work with the same patients and need to have compatible goals.
Because of that, the nuances between the jobs can get blurred. To keep us focused on the bigger picture though, remember that each career takes a very different focus and approach to working with people mechanics vs.
I wanted to help people problem solve the activities they need to do everyday. Helping a child develop sensory strategies to sit through class, celebrating someone who learned how to use adaptive equipment to put on their pants after an accident, doing art with a patient undergoing cancer treatment.
Those are all things that have been meaningful for me to help with as an OT. I was also drawn to OT because I liked art. It was so neat to me that I could use art to help people heal and achieve their goals. OT may be a great place for you as well if you have an artistic side and want to incorporate it into your profession.
I had an entire class in grad school about using art with my clients. While general, here are other signs you may be pulled to one or the other:. Hand therapy is an important realm of OT to highlight. Hand therapy involves any rehab relating to the hands, whether it be from an accident or injury.
What is Physical Therapy? There are many differences between occupational therapy and physical therapy. Each profession has a specific scope of practice that is regulated by state licensure and practitioners work in many different practice settings. In general, physical therapists treat specific areas of the body to improve strength, movement, balance, and to improve the quality and safety of mobility.
For example, a physical therapist would help an adult client with a degenerative condition to improve his or her ability to walk and manage stairs with an assistive ambulatory device. As a comparison, occupational therapists assist people to participate in activities of everyday life that people need to do, want to do, and are expected to do. A great resource to review for further differences between these fields is to visit the websites of the American Occupational Therapy Association and the American Physical Therapy Association.
Despite the differences between occupational therapy and physical therapy, there are some similarities between these fields as well.
A physical therapist could potentially have a client who has suffered a stroke and is relearning how to walk with an assistive device whereas an occupational therapist may have the same client but they are being trained on how to use a wheelchair to get from his or her bed to the bathroom toilet in order to perform their own toileting.
Both therapists are working on mobility but in different ways and for different reasons. Here are some other tasks and responsibilities that can be common across both fields, both occupational and physical therapy:.
Occupational therapists are practitioners who help enable persons to do the day-to-day activities that are important and meaningful to their health and well-being. Occupational therapists work across many different types of practice settings, such as schools, hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, outpatient clinics, home health, early intervention, community health, and mental health.
Occupational therapists work full-time, part-time, or on a consultant-basis. For example, an occupational therapist may have several clients with the same diagnosis, but they are all treated differently because each client has different things that they need to do, want to do, and are expected to do. These statistics, provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics BLS , show that occupational therapy is a well-compensated profession, with an average annual pay that is far greater than the average earnings across all jobs in the United States.
Even the starting salary of the lowest ten percent is significantly higher than that average American salary. The BLS projects 23, new jobs to open in the occupational therapy field by This growth rate is largely due to the aging Baby Boomer population in need of occupational aid in their advanced years. The average number of individuals affected by long-term physical or mental disability only increases the demand for properly educated and trained occupational therapists.
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