RECHARGED!!!!

Faith is renewed in my profession after attending the 90th Annual AOTA Conference in Orlando this weekend.

Hyperbole perhaps? Okay, so maybe I’m a little bit of a lemming.  After all, we all know the party line of the AOTA is something akin to Richard Simmons trying to motivate the gravity-challenged folks, who are his audience,  to shedding some pounds. They want us to leave the conference revitalized and true believers in the brand they have so carefully crafted in preparation for the upcoming centennial of the OT profession. Which, I might add, is not necessarily a bad thing. But to those who know me, I’ve never been one to jump on the bandwagon. In college, I joined a fraternity and purposely did not drink to excess and party hard…much. I ignored, and still ignore, fashion trends and fads of the day. Look at how much disregard I demonstrate of grammatical and punctuatory (I know, not a word) precepts. But truthfully, (and if I can’t be honest here then where can I be?) I was sucked in by the seminal topics of courses, fresh extemporaneous conversation struck up in the halls, at roundtables and finally at the “propaganda” that took place in most of the general assemblies. Not to demean the quality of the band at the welcoming ceremony but am I the only one who found their attempts at galvanizing the audience conspicuous? Nah, we all knew and we didn’t care because the real stars of the show made it worthwhile. The students! Their energy was infectious and even managed to coax a dance move out of a shy and introspective OT (they exist!) who shall remain nameless. It was heartening to see almost two thirds of the audience get on their feet when AOTA president Dr. Moyers asked the students to rise and be recognized. Hopefully, we don’t lose too many of those personalities over the upcoming years. Our profession needs that energy.

I think that it would be difficult for many therapists to attend a conference and not have a career affirming experience. Or, if not career affirming, at the very least a positive one. The alternative, I fear, is for this unfortunate therapist or student to distance him or herself from the rest of the profession; possibly hurting our reputation in the eyes of our customers or straying away from the tenets of what makes OT such a great profession. I was fortunate enough to: run into a friendly therapist I used to work with, just happen to sit next to an AOTA executive at the Slagle Lecture who gave me a great idea to try for a mini research project within my company, almost tripped over an OT icon, met another author of one of the books I reviewed on this blog, ran into one of the few students I have mentored, I coincidentally took a Tech Day course from an individual who happens to be one of the inspirations for my blog and have an interesting discussion about how useful the web can be to OT’s and met other wonderful people while working my company’s booth at the Expo. Oh, and all of that was in addition to taking some excellent classes. Not that all of the classes were so great. After the first day, I was ready to go home because the courses I took were so bad. Instead, I decided to stay up all night and reorganize my conference schedule to include more AOTA courses as well as presentations by students. I think, for the most part, the students did a much better job of presenting evidence than most of the non-AOTA presenters.

There were a few missteps that could have been avoided, but for the most part, the conference was a success.  Who decided to put the Health Care Reform review in the smallest meeting room? Somebody couldn’t foresee that being a popular seminar?!  Why were locations so scattered around the ENORMOUS Orange County Convention Center? Heaven forbid you had interests that required you to run across three stories after leaving a course several minutes early. I’ll stop short of comparing this conference with other, possibly better conferences, simply because all who attended were nice enough to come visit my neck of the woods.

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