Maneshka Perera is a Senior Occupational Therapist at Rusk Rehabilitation. She has worked with individuals with spinal cord injuries for the past six years and currently serves on the Executive Board of Directors for the New York Chapter of the Spinal Cord Injury Association. She has helped to cultivate a manual intervention that was developed by a physical therapy colleague to address trunk weakness in neurological patients, and is working towards integrating the technique into the occupational therapy scope of practice. She also has co-authored a publication in OT Advance for occupational therapy practitioners, highlighting and introducing the technique and its ability to have an impact on activities of daily living. In this interview, Maneshka discusses successful efforts in treating patients who experience trunk weakness resulting from their injury. She also describes how teaching patients and their caregivers to incorporate the spinal mobility technique along with other resistive, aerobic and pulmonary exercises based on each individual’s level of injury is critical to success.
