THE THERAPIST WITH THE 3-TRACK MIND

This article reports some of the results of the American Occupational Therapy Association/American Occupational Therapy Foundation Clinical Reasoning Study. Therapists are thought to use three different types of reasoning when solving problems in day-to-day practice. Procedural reasoning guides the therapist in thinking about the patient's physical performance problems. Interactive reasoning is used when the therapist wants to understand the patient as a person. Conditional reasoning is used to integrate the other two types of reasoning as well as to project an imagined future condition or situation for the person. Experienced occupational therapists seem to shift smoothly from one mode of thinking to another in order to analyze, interpret, and resolve various types of clinical problems.