CEP 818: How Do I Love Thee: Embodied Thinking

As an athletic trainer I find myself empathizing quite often with my patients and athletes. I feel it is important to put yourself in their position to better understand their point of view. Having had my own experience with broken bones and rehabilitative therapy, it is a bit easier for me to call upon what feelings the patients/athletes may be experiencing than it may be for others. Emotional feelings surrounding injury certainly take some effort to understand, but what about the physical feelings of the injury? If I am treating a patient for a shoulder injury, should I not also try to understand the pain within the shoulder beyond the question “tell me how your shoulder is feeling today”? Will feeling this pain in my own shoulder better help me to understand the struggles they face with activities of daily living in addition to their emotional struggles with injury?

 

Below is a poem I found that I feel captures the essence of embodiment. While it doesn't necessarily relate directly to the rehab scenario I've described above, I believe that much can be learned by not setting myself apart from the patient.

The wise [girl] is one
who never sets [herself] apart
from other living things,
whether they have speech or not,
and in later years [she] strove long
to learn what can be learned,
in silence,
from the eyes of animals,
the flight of birds,
the great slow gestures of trees.

From A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin

Discussion

Embodied thinking to me is a feeling or sensation felt within the body without having touched or felt an actual object or been in a given situation. As an example given in Sparks of Genius, Helen Keller could feel the coldness and taste the sweetness of ice cream on her tongue and that is how she knew she wanted ice cream.

I chose this particular aspect of rehabilitative therapy to embody because it will help me be more in sync with my patients and their injuries. To understand how they are truly feeling, an excellent subjective history must be taken, which is done at every therapy appointment. Great listening skills are also a prerequisite, if you will, to embodied thinking in this scenario. How is the pain in their shoulder feeling that day? Is it: dull and achy, sharp, burning or tight? Not only will this help with embodiment of their pain, but it can also assist in assessing pathology of the pain.

I think bringing embodiment to this aspect of rehab will be beneficial to both the clinician and patient. Being better connected to the patient is going to bring about a greater care for them and their concerns which generates trust in the clinician’s abilities. Patients come when a part of them is weak or not fully functioning. This leads to a sense of vulnerability to a certain degree. I believe that recognizing this vulnerability and being able to really “feel” what is like to be in that position will help build a patient/clinician relationship and perhaps make me an even better clinician in and of itself.  If I can feel the tightness of a post-operative rotator cuff repair in my own shoulder, I can better relate to the frustrations of the patient and find better ways to ease their pains (physical and emotional)and anxieties.