This month at our monthly member meeting we welcomed guest speakers and post-doctoral fellows in neuropsychology Maral Aghivinian and Lily Kamalyan to our monthly meeting where they presented on how the environments we live in can affect our brain health. Maral and Lily are co-founders of Meedk, an organization “dedicated to increasing knowledge, education, and research related to brain health among the global Armenian population.” Their presentation to our team of therapists was pertinent and informative.
Cognition plays a major role in a patient’s ability to access rehabilitation services and as therapists, PTs, OTs and SLPs must take this into consideration during our initial evaluation and throughout treatment plans. We often treat patients with cognitive differences or deficits due to acute brain injury or else chronic conditions, and we study the brain in order to better understand this. When it comes to studying the brain, we cannot separate the external factors from the internal ones. Our environment is one of the largest external factors we must consider and this presentation helped to highlight the many ways this can manifest in a patient. Thanks to Maral and Lily’s presentation, our team has some new food for thought to consider when it comes to addressing brain health!