Crutches and Canes for People with Disabilities - Essay Example

Crutches and Canes 1 Crutches and Canes Crutches and Canes Author University Crutches and Canes 2 Abstract Handicap and people with disabilities is the direct user of crutches and canes. It is very important that they are socially educated for them to be efficient and functional in the society. Though these people are considered as mainstream in our society but they have also the right t live as normal people. Incidence rate of handicap or individual with disability may sound alarming but a way of helping them through the cooperation of both general practitioners (GPs) and complimentary or alternative specialist so that patients will develop appositive perspective in life making them an asset not liability of the society. Extending our hands to this people is one way of building bridges of unity instead of building walls of disintegration. The state should foster the rights of these people to live as normal despite their physical limitations. Crutches and Canes 3 Crutches and canes are the means for patients having problems with mobility resulting from disability mostly of musculoskeletal diseases, visual handicap or even patients suffering from mild to moderate stroke due to high blood pressure. Crutches are mostly used by patients with moderate to slightly severe orthopedic related case while canes are often used by patients with mild orthopedic cases, visual impairment and stroke patients. The important aspects of having crutches and canes for patients who need orthopedic care and management is to improve mobility function of patients leading to a good, healthy-quality of life. It is then necessary for patients to understand and know his/her needs so that his/her mobility function would fit in his/her lifestyle. The concept of crutches and canes may create a positive and negative impact for those who are in need of it but it is one of the many means of helping the handicap in order for them to be self reliant and productive despite their disability. One positive aspect may be is the physiological attributes of crutches and canes where it is of great help for those people who are handicap or disable. Its function serves the purpose that patients manage to develop his/her locomotor skills the way it is beneficial to him/her. That is why patients should know what their needs are so that the physiological aspect of crutches and canes will be met exactly. But there are cases where crutches and canes may develop a psychological setback for patients and may have affected the socio-cultural aspect of the patient. Psychologically, patients may develop insecurities and self pity that he/she may feel being left out considering that he/she has deformities. Like with the case of patient whose name preferred to be anonymous, he is a polio patient who wears crutches from early childhood until now that he was already grown up. Eventually, he develops a negative attitude and a defensive mood because of his thinking that he is a handicap person and he considers himself as useless person. Crutches and Canes 4 When his playmates laugh, he often thinks he was being ridiculed. He has the feeling of being discriminated all the time thus he is very much dependent with his parents financially though his crutches helped in his mobility. But he was not a self reliant and self functional person right now because he failed to continue his studies due to reasons of self pity and negative thoughts. Those people belonging to such as these may have a feeling of being unwanted most especially during their childhood years seeing normal children walking normally and running so fast while here he/she is making everything possible with his/her crutches and cane in order to be able to walk as normally as he/she could. But treating those patients as normal people trying to live normally in this world instead of treating them as liabilities may give a sound mind for acceptance. Before, patients who have problems with their musculoskeletal functions have access to orthopedic care but access to services offered by the community or population as a whole are limited for these people. Nowadays, handicap people were given priority in terms of access to community life, it is a way of treating them with due respect. There are signs of accessibility in the transportation, institutions, industries, groceries, department stores or malls for these people with handicap or disabilities. There are already some organizations that help these handicap people with their crutches and canes and a moral support with proper education to assist the mindset of these people. So the socio-cultural aspect of those people with crutches and canes will be compensated with a positive outlook of life, proper guidance and complete support by those organizations that helped them. But most especially their direct caregivers, the parents should have the direct know how or hands on for these handicaps to build a proper training as early as childhood to assist these handicap to be self reliant and be self functional for the society or community. Parents should foster love and support for their children with disabilities. Crutches and Canes 5 There are variable incidence of patients having crutches and canes from any type of handicap; from blindness to orthopedic cases, high blood pressure resulting to strokes and even accidents that may cause bone and joints injury. There are many cases of disabilities, some are congenital meaning while baby still in the womb; some are acquired due to accidents and in the case of older men or women who suffered from strokes or other musculoskeletal diseases. A clinical study was done about the Survey of school children with visual impairment in Bradford, (Schwarz, Yeung, Symons and Bradbury, pp. 530-534). The survey resulted to the following: Seventy-two children between the ages of 5 and 16 years were included in this survey. The male: female ratio was 2.1: 1. Twenty-one children were Caucasian, 42 were of Pakistani and nine of other racial origin. The most common diagnoses were congenital nystagmus (19), ocular albinism (6), myopia (4), cataract (4) and microphthalmia (4). Twenty-five children had a genetically linked visual diagnosis and 31 had a family history of the same visual disorder. (pp. 530-534) Another study was done to determine the prevalence of congenital orthopedic anomalies in a rural community, (Mittal, Sekhon, Singh and Thakral, pp. 11-12). The result of the study was: A rural Indian population of 50,055 was studied for the detection of congenital orthopedic anomalies by a door-to-door survey. An incidence of 2.25 cases per 1000 population was found. Club foot was the commonest anomaly at 0.9 per 1000, followed by polydactyl and syndactyl at 0.45 and 0.38 cases per 1000. The most common anomaly found in females was a congenital short 4th metatarsal (0.24 per 1000). The study shows only that the incidence of congenital cases was more likely to have the chance of using crutches and canes in their adulthood. Oxford Journal of Rheumatology had a study about the Prevalence and incidence of adults consulting for shoulder conditions in UK primary care; patterns of diagnosis and referral, (Linsell, Dawson, Zondervan, Rose, Randall, Fitzpatrick and Carr, pp. 215-221). The result of the survey was: Crutches and Canes 6 The annual prevalence and incidence of people consulting for a shoulder condition was 2.36% [95% confidence interval (CI) 2.32–2.40%] and 1.47% (95% CI 1.44–1.50%), respectively. Prevalence increased linearly with age whilst incidence peaked at around 50 yr then remained static at around 2%. Around half of the incident cases consulted once only, while 13.6% were still consulting with a shoulder problem during the third year of follow-up. During the 3 yr following initial presentation, 22.4% of patients were referred to secondary care, 30.8% were prescribed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and 10.6% were given an injection by their general practitioner (GP). GPs tended to use a limited number of generalized codes when recording a diagnosis; just five of 426 possible Read codes relating to shoulder conditions accounted for 74.6% of the diagnoses of new cases recorded by GPs. Source: Vaccines, Immunization and Biologicals, WHO.INT The variable incidence of any cases related to the use of crutches and canes, may it be orthopedic cases, visual impairment or any disability related to malfunction of mobility has economic impact for patients and for General practitioners as well. For patients, it may add another burden Crutches and Canes 7 on their pocket or it may serve as additional budget for parents having children with disabilities that need crutches and canes to move about. For orthopedic doctors, it may be an additional income but it is also their obligation to look for possible means in order that their patients will have the pleasure of walking with the aid of crutches and canes. Parents or any individual with impairment such as mentioned earlier left with no choice but to use crutches and canes for the purpose of mobility so that they can go about with their daily task without a need to disturb other people for their own needs. Though there are many non-government organizations or foundations that helped some of the handicaps in our society thus others may acquire crutches and canes for free. But basically the economic impact for these people with disabilities is not viable in the sense that these people will be deprived of economic and social opportunities because of their physical limitations and chances for these people to gain work after school is less than what is expected. There should be a law for these people to safeguard their chances of meeting employment after school for them to be able to survive in this challenging world. Handicap people or with disabilities need to have a social formation towards community accessibility so that these people will be empowered to have a voice in the society or community. This will give them an opportunity to educate themselves so that it may help them build their own lives in the future. These people should not be deprived of anything that normal people may enjoy but it is for them to be able to achieve some things in their lives in the right perspective with a direct involvement in the community or society. There are certain therapies for these people to choose from nowadays most especially with children affected with disabilities. There is already a conflicting factor for any treatment between conventional therapy, complimentary therapy and alternative therapy. Just like saying which is Crutches and Canes 8 better conventional treatment or alternative treatment. Complimentary therapies like massage therapy, shiatsu, acupressure, reiki, polarity therapy are helping general practitioners (GPs) in the treatment of their patients. This doesn’t hold true to handicap people alone but also for pain management and other rehabilitation purposes. Like in the case of taking an alternative medicine for that matter with regard to treatment of any disease such as taking any herbal food supplement for disease prevention. It is very important to note that GPs may work with alternative specialist in order to solve certain cases of disabilities or handicap so that crutches and canes will be useful to its effect. Complimentary therapy or alternative therapy may incorporate its idea to orthopedics for the complete rehabilitation of the patient making him/her useful not to himself alone but also to the community as a whole. Proper education and teaching strategies should be implemented to these people especially during its nursery days since they belong to children with special needs already so a certain programs of education should be introduced to them. The higher demand of SPED teachers in our society now only demonstrates an influx of incidence therefore the government should give importance to the needs for special children. The state should provide educational needs or teaching strategies for handicap or disabled children. it is very important for these children to develop certain attitude for them to be useful and self reliant because in that way they will learn how to live independently in this world. The only help any one may offer for these people is to lend a supporting hand that needs profound understanding, acceptance and direct accessibility for in order to eliminate or if not lessen the chances of vulnerability in this world from economic, social and health risks. The society should learn to love and accept these people for them to feel that they are needed and also loved so that negative influence will be lessen for these people. Crutches and Canes 9 References: 1. K. Schwarz, S. Yeung, N. Symons and J. Bradbury, September 2002. Survey of school children with visual impairment in Bradford, Volume 16, Number 5, Pages 530-534. Retrieved September 08, 2008 from http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v16/n5/full/6700059a.html. 2. R. L. Mittal, A. S. Sekhon, G. Singh and H. Thakral, February 1993. The prevalence of congenital orthopaedic anomalies in a rural community, Volume 17, Number 1, Pages 11-12. Retrieved September 8, 2008 from http://www.springerlink.com/content/k877p432112168w4/. 3. L. Linsell, J. Dawson, K. Zondervan, P. Rose, T. Randall, R. Fitzpatrick and A. Carr, November 2005. Prevalence and incidence of adults consulting for shoulder conditions in UK primary care; patterns of diagnosis and referral, Volume 45, Number 2, Pages 215-221. Retrieved September 8, 2008 from http://rheumatology.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/45/2/215. 4. Polio Global Annual Reported Incidence and POL3 coverage, 1980-2003. Vaccines, Immunization and Biologicals, World Health Organization. Retrieved September 8, 2008 from http://www.who.int/vaccines-surveillance/graphics/htmls/IncPolio.htm. 5. R. Wiman, E. Helander, J. Westland, June 2002. Meeting the needs of people with Disabiltities – new approaches in the health sector, Volume 1, Number 2. Retrieved September 8, 2008 from http://wwwwds.worldbank.org/servlet/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&entityID=000012009_20030909095620.   Read More

 

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