New Electives at LuHi: Advanced Sports Medicine
Each year, LuHi offers new elective courses. These courses help students learn new skills, broaden their interests, and think critically about new topics. This week, we are highlighting a new Semester 2 course here at LuHi – Advanced Sports Medicine.
Advanced Sports Medicine is a course designed and taught by Mrs. Heather O’Leary. She shared that there are many LuHi students that desire to go into health care fields, and she wanted to design an elective course that helps them continue to learn and grow in their area of interest. In this course, she hopes to offer a deeper look into life as a physical therapist or athletic trainer. For the curriculum, Mrs. O’Leary shared that she plans to cover the following: “advanced medical terminology, the musculoskeletal system, mechanism of injuries, stages of healing, & modalities / rehabilitation of injuries during the first quarter of the class; and anatomy, evaluation, and injuries of the ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand during the second quarter of the class.”
LuHi has offered its popular Sports Medicine elective for the past few years. The advanced course, according to Mrs. O’Leary, will go beyond what students learn in the introductory course. It will be a balance of hands-on activities and written examinations focused on the important terminology and vocabulary. For the hands-on aspects of the class, she shared that they will using different modalities, rehabilitation equipment, goniometers, reflex hammers, and other tools that would be helpful in evaluating injuries. According to Mrs. O’Leary, “The first [Sports Medicine] course was basically taping, bracing, and more of the preventative work with athletes. This course will be focusing on the aftercare of injuries and how we can evaluate the basic injuries of our body.”
Students enrolled in the course are very excited about the new elective offering. Amanda ’21 shared, “I love learning about the human body, and I wanted to learn more hands on techniques about injuries and taping methods. Since I am an athlete, a lot of this information is good to know for the future while I play sports. I am looking forward to using some of the equipment for testing and other cool tools for evaluating injuries.”