Fall 2025
Lab Rats and Book Bodies: Creating Intersubjectivity for Patients and Practitioners
This moving artist’s report seeks to equate the experiences of lab rats with those of patients within our healthcare system. Are both simply objects of observation, of intervention? Or are they living beings with a shared power and beauty that can be witnessed at the microscopic level? The author translates her insights from the laboratory into an immediate experience for readers with homemade books whose images raise the minute to the universal.
To Be, to Inflect, to Feel
This insightful report encapsulates the value of adding a humanistic dimension to rehabilitation. As told through the eyes of a student physical therapist assessing her patient’s progress—and determining that adding empathy to the treatment process was crucial to achieving a positive result—delineates how the realization can occur in all clinicians. It is a direct, on-the-ground view of the importance of JHR’s mission.
Physical Therapy is More than Just Physical
This insightful report encapsulates the value of adding a humanistic dimension to rehabilitation. As told through the eyes of a student physical therapist assessing her patient’s progress—and determining that adding empathy to the treatment process was crucial to achieving a positive result—delineates how the realization can occur in all clinicians. It is a direct, on-the-ground view of the importance of JHR’s mission.
Beyond Pathology: (Re)conceptualizing Distress in Chronic Pain Care
The “vignette case study” first presented here is based on a compilation of the author’s experiences treating patients with chronic pain. Crucial questions are then addressed. How big a part does stress play? What effect does culture have? The author dives deep into the multiple dimensions of the individual experience of pain. The article details why bringing humanities into rehabilitation is of crucial importance for people dealing with chronic pain.
Block and Fall
The COVID pandemic highlighted a reality that certain healthcare workers have always faced: as they care for others, they also put themselves at risk. How do you handle knowing you could be harmed by the very profession your heart has called you to join? In this powerful short poem, Katy Giebenhain encapsulates the mad courage it can sometimes take to simply go to work at a medical facility: “It’s the job.”
The Crying Oboe and Steady Strings
In this gentle yet heart-rending poem, Dr. Sue Curfman follows the notes of Dvorak’s 9th symphony (‘New World’), 2nd movement, as she pictures her patients in pain, “with whom I am privileged to walk.” As the different instruments rise and fade, she likens them to the struggle toward healing that rehabilitation teams – patient and therapist – experience together. The 2nd movement is available online; you can listen to its opening strains as you experience these words unfolding.
Political Advocacy in Occupational Therapy: A Professional Imperative
This study conducted interviews with occupational therapists to report on their perceptions of political advocacy. The interviews identified three key ways that advocacy fundamentally benefits OT: It helps practitioners fight for clients’ access to quality care; it advances the profession itself; and it can continually influence policy changes. But how can OTs find the time, and the space, to advocate? Quotes from interviewees bring the abstract down to the clinic level.
Can You Hear Me, Now?
In this inspirational piece, the author details how one crucial act, performed when she was a child by an occupational therapist, formed her entire life path. It was the simple act of teaching her how to hold a pencil in her hand to write. Fast forward to today, and Katherine Magnoli is a writer, a teacher, and an author of children’s books designed to help them choose their own unique career paths.
We Are All Missing Something: A Meditation on Amputation, Constraints, and Creativity
This brilliant Perspective raises a profound question: what if ‘disability’ is simply one point on a spectrum of constraints that inspire creativity in every person on earth? The author states, “…I struggle to know at what point I qualified in the minds of others as ‘disabled.’” He presents a powerful argument for focusing on what humans can do, and not on what may constrain us at any given point in our lives. A poetic must-read.
Thinking Through Making
As this author poured through the data from a study of 30 stroke survivors, she found she “couldn’t move past the emotion present in the text.” The study sought to understand factors affecting success in an OT program. But the words of the interviewees went far deeper. To attempt to fully understand their realities, she turned to her own creative core—quilting—and translated black-and-white data points into the living colors of individual emotions.