Lauren Laborde's Case Study - ALS

Lauren's case study ironically was focused on Lou Gehrig. This was the person that ALS was informally named after ("Lou Gehrig's disease"). In addition to her research over Lou and his disease, she also put in extra effort to find out why it was named after him. The only conclusion she could up with is that he was the first "famous person / athlete" to be diagnosed with this condition in the United States. Outside of the U.S. ALS is not known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Because of the time of his death, Lauren did an excellent job on portraying the differences in occupational therapy then (1940) and now (2017). She mentioned that occupational therapy was still relatively new when he was diagnosed and might be a part of the reason he only lived for three years after diagnoses. Adaptive equipment was limited and couldn't put much affect of quality of life. Lauren expressed intervention planning around optimizing strength and ROM, maintaining function in ADL and iADL, decreasing fatigue, and managing pain and energy. Overall, I think this was an excellent choice considering Lou's condition made him degenerate.