10- FOXcast PT: Mariana Wingood at CSM 2018

Jimmy: Welcome to FOXcast PT, a podcast for clinician’s made by clinician’s. It’s brought to you by FOX Rehabilitation. Find out more at foxrehab.org.

All right welcome to FOXcast physical therapy. I’m your host physical therapist Jimmy. Continuing our coverage here at the combined sections meeting or CSM as the cool kids are calling it. In New Orleans 2018. And we are at the FOX booth here. Been talking to a lot of us students and new grads. Who kind of know how FOX would recognize the orange or see that everywhere. Tell me more about what you do if you’re not at the conference and you’re hearing this afterwards. You can check out FOXRehab.org. Find out if you are a fit for FOX if working with older adults is something that you would like to do. Our next guest is a full time clinician and involved in the Academy of geriatrics amongst an arm length of things. Welcome to the show Mariana Wingood. Thanks for coming on.

Mariana: Oh thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited to be here.

Jimmy: You have a list of things that you do. You seem a little bit like me. You don’t stop moving.

Mariana: No, I get really easily bored. So I like to have my hands in many pots and I get super excited about various projects that are really elevating our practice and really making a difference in our patients lives.

Jimmy: So we’ll just we’ll start big and we’ll go to specific stuff. What are the different projects that you’re in just maybe list a couple.

Mariana: So, I’m in a geriatric edge task force I am co chair of the programming committee that helps put on CSM and selects our programming and helps with our member meetings and all that. I am also the balance and fall special interest groups SIG chair. I also help with various projects of the practice committee at times and I teach for various evidence in motion. I did some medbridge teaching and I volunteer at our local university to really touch base with students and get them involved as well as do some guest lecturing there.

Jimmy: Do you sleep?

Mariana: I get that question a lot actually. I have an issue also I’m training for my first ironman.

Jimmy: Me too, well not my first but where were you going, what course? So I’m actually doing a knockoff Ironman brand because it was $400 cheaper.

Jimmy: Where are you going to be?

Mariana: It’s in Kingston New York. I am up in Vermont so I think it was not too far away.

Jimmy: Yeah I grew up not far from Kingston New York. The Hudson Valley near Newburgh New York on the Hudson River.

Mariana: My family is near Albany NY.

Jimmy: Yeah. Good for you. Good luck once the race. All right we want to talk about something that you’re really passionate about within the field which is balance.

Mariana: Yeah balance is really you know it’s something that we really need to work on with fall prevention. So multifactorial and something that we can prevent from happening and we have such an impact as PT’s to really collaborate with other healthcare professionals and make a difference in and our patients and community dwelling older adults lives.

Jimmy: You’re also as you mentioned at the top of the show you’re also on a on a sig. What goes on there why would someone who’s listening right now in the conference center amongst 17,000 PT’s or online Facebook Live through @foxrehab or through the podcast. Why should someone look at that particular SIG?

Mariana: I mean SIGs are a great way to get additional information and balance and falls as such an important topic that is affected and many practice settings and some of the things we offer through the SIG is a bimonthly journal club we sent out newsletters that include article reviews of recent research. We are putting together an outcome measure project to make clinical useful tools that are easy to use for clinicians. And there’s a lot of resources for clinicians as well as researchers and educators to be involved.

Jimmy: All right you’re a member of the section. How much extra does it cost to be a member of a SIG

Mariana: Nothing. Zero. It is so easy to do. All you have to do is go to the academy’s website and then look at the SIGs and say I want to become a member.

Jimmy: Done. And you get so much and you’re already in the section you’ve done the hard work you paid the extra money. But you’re getting value out of it. Now jump in those Sig’s. Yeah. Shoot. Join all of them and figure out which ones you like.

Mariana: Exactly. And there’s the leaders in the SIGs are great and we always love enthusiastic individuals coming to us. And if you don’t have all the knowledge it’s OK, that’s why we’re here to learn from each other. And if you have all the knowledge share and share.

Jimmy: I heard a frame of mind a frame of reference in terms of challenging balance and it was that the person you’re training in balance should fail twenty five percent of the time. That you should be so difficult that they’re not just succeeding.

Mariana: Yeah definitely. We should be challenging our patients and kind of having them fail a little bit because that’s how they learn. Many times we immediately catch a patient or try to help them but really that’s not helping them for motor learning they need to make mistakes that need to be able to recover. And really to be honest when do most falls happen? They happen when the person doesn’t have enough our inability to recover from the loss of balance. We all have a loss of balance. But it’s the recovery that really makes.

Jimmy: We seem to have no problem with that when we’re talking about teaching a child to stand and walk for the first time we understand it’s necessary. Now I’m not saying your patients fall to the ground but don’t want the older adults fault ground but they should lose that balance and then try to do all those things because you mentioned your neuromuscular training and strength and movement patterns and knowing what that feeling of falling is like.

Mariana: I mean sometimes it takes two to three steps to catch their balance but that’s OK. They caught it.

Jimmy: And we want to prevent those falls because we know that’s a slippery slope after that fall occurs. What else are you passionate about besides the laundry list of things you get over the top of the show, what else what else we want talk about?

Mariana: I mean the other thing that I really love is having older adults meet physical activity guidelines and what barriers are there for them to meet those guidelines and how can we help them overcome them? Because a lot of times we have our patients in our clinic they do great work with them but it takes 50 hours to really decrease someone’s risk for falls so that it’s going to be past our time in clinic. However when most people discharge they stop exercising they stop doing what we recommend. And I really want to find out more about why that is and how can we help them overcome that.

Jimmy: It’s a that’s a big hurdle to overcome but I think that’s our hurdle as a profession to recognize we own this and we have to make sure that we are doing something, thinking about ways over that hurdle. Because it’s important. What else are you experiencing here at CSM that you’re really going to take home?

Mariana: I just love the energy of CSM and in that working with people and meeting people such as yourself and seeing what everyone does it really helps me go home. And you know sometimes not sleep eight hours because I’m just so excited about a project that’s happening, and I really want to elevate our practice together. It’s great to see the higher level of evidence and the critical thinking that’s happening. And I gave a talk yesterday and at a half an hour early and 30 people stayed for a half an hour. And that’s really the key of a successful session.

Jimmy: When we talk about why come to a conference? Can I just watch a webinar? You can. You know you can do a podcast about something you read a book. There’s many things you can do that’s 30 minutes afterwards with 30 people having a conversation in person with eye contact. We don’t get a lot of eye contact these days you know on our cell phones or computers in front of us. You can get some real knowledge. The group stays with you if you do it in that sort of forward. That’s why coming to a conference as often as you really can is important.

Mariana: Totally agree with you.

Jimmy: Plus you know New Orleans in February. Not the hardest sell to get people to come here.

Mariana: You know I’m from Vermont and I don’t know how people down here do have this humidity thing. It’s so hot. I’m like sweating profusely from his walking from the hotel out to here.

Jimmy: Crazy I know. Well you got good skiing you could come down here and buy you some crawfish, slice of life whatever you want to do. We ask everybody here to tell their FOX tale, why you choose to work with older adults?

Mariana: Oh gosh. I have always known to work with older adults. I had a grandma who basically raised me and I want to thank all older adults for helping out the generations of the future and they’re underserved and underappreciated and I just really want to make a difference in their life and improve their quality.

Jimmy: Love that. Where can people find find it and reach out to you. How can they get in touch?

Mariana: So I’m on Twitter. My Twitter handle is elevating EBP. I am also the SIG chair. Contact me through that. And I’m on Facebook. I am very happy to talk to anyone.

Mariana: Sounds great. Mariana, I appreciate you stopping by and taking some time to share everything your experience you here with us.

Mariana: Thank you so much for having me.

Jimmy: Thanks for listening to FOXcast PT, a clinically excellent podcast. It’s brought to you by FOX Rehabilitation. Listen to other episodes or read articles and position papers at foxrehab.org.