CEP 818: Abstracting

Abstraction
My topic is rehabilitation and my abstraction is the very reason for rehab: healing. There are several musculoskeletal injuries that require rehabilitation and many different methods and exercises, though the end goal of healing is stays constant. The body naturally heals itself and therapists and clinicians simply help it along. To understand the abstraction, you'll need a bit of background information. Below you'll find a diagram of a muscle. The muscle is broken down into multiple segments that "fit in" to each other. Imagine a box of drinking straws. The box is the outside of the muscle and all the little straws are essentially the bundles of muscle fibers that make up the muscle.

 

After having a basic understanding of a muscle the abstraction will make much more sense. A muscle strain is essentially those muscle fibers being torn apart. Now, think of a rope. Imagine that rope frayed with all those little individual fibers separated from the singular unit they comprised. An injured muscle presents similarly as the fibers are torn apart from the whole. Now, imagine those fibers coming back together to reconstruct the singular muscle. Rehabilitation assists in this reconstruction process.

 

My second medium of abstractions comes through a painting I found. When an injury occurs, scar tissue (collagen and sorts) comes in to fill in the gaps. This tissue is laid down in a randomized and messy pattern. Through rehabilitation, these fibers are stressed to help them form the proper pattern to better align with the original, uninjured tissue (muscles, ligaments).

Scar tissue goes from messy on the left to more organized on the right 

        

 Take a look at this picture below. The bottom half is messy and seems rather disorganized, such as the collagen and other scar tissue components come in to help heal injured tissue. Through the rehabilitative process, the disorganization becomes organized and the end-stage of healing has been achieved.

 

Discussion

Abstraction to observe an essential quality or characteristic of a subject or topic. While many subjects may have many qualities that are essential, there is always one that, without it, the subject would simply not be the same. 

There are several characteristics to musculoskeletal rehab such as movement or even the use of modalities. But, I chose healing/tissue remodeling as my essential quality because regardless of the injury, healing is always the desired outcome or goal.  

I think this abstraction is well represented through the tangible medium of the frayed rope and the visual medium of the painting. People/students are familiar with both of these things and I feel using them to aid in teaching the topic of injury healing and the role of rehabilitative therapy will aid to further their understanding of such a science-based, data driven topic.