2002 Professional Seminar: Hemi-Sync® as a Complementary Treatment with Long-Term Residents (Richard Standt & Judy McKee)

2002 Professional Seminar: Hemi-Sync® as a Complementary Treatment with Long-Term Residents (Richard Standt & Judy McKee) (Transcript) NOTE: This is a raw transcript – it is exactly as created by otter.ai. 00:01 surely we're here to introduce because she's really responsible for enabling them to come and for finding out about what they were doing. And I'm gonna let them introduce themselves, but it's just, it's always neat. It's wonderful how the old timers come back. And it's it's just really wonderful to have new people come in who have been using Hemi sync, and they get to meet all of you and realize that they can come here 15 years later and not be jaded, you know, it's just a really nice thing to have happen. So I'm really happy to introduce Richard and Judy. 00:46 I'm Judy Nikki, I'm an occupational therapy assistant, Richard's assistant. And I've only known him for two years, and he has positively changed my life. I started to work at South Mountain 20 years, 22 years ago, and I was a nursing assistant for the first 14 and I became burnout, which is pretty easy to do. It's a very physical job. It's very interesting. You have to do all over what we call ADLs for activities of daily living for the residents. And I just kept feeling that there was something that I wanted to do. And thankfully, Pennsylvania had a shortage of nurses. And some wonderful doctors started the school year on nurses program. And I got to go back to school for that. And so I became an occupational therapist. And like I said, for the first six years, I did the traditional things that occupational therapy school teaches you. And since I've met Richard he's kind of broadened my horizons and that's why we're I guess we started him you think? 02:05 Hello, can you hear me? Okay? Okay, distance, I mean, how about their Closer, closer? Okay. This live in Pennsylvania, well, four years. From taxes, and we, my wife and I, after I received a master's in occupational therapy, traveled around the country, and worked with long term care facilities for contract, we had companies. And we finally had chance to move here to call. And luckily, I was able to be hired on with the state of Pennsylvania at South Mountain. And during that time, we've seen a training with approach called John Barnes myofascial release. And that is a advanced bodywork technique, which uses music, as well as tactile manipulation of the body, and Williams pathway to now. But anyway, during my time as an occupational therapist, worked a lot with physical disabilities. We had individuals from surgeries, who had had strokes and injuries were much psychiatric, or mental health until a camera's off. And this is quite a different population. These individuals are unique in that they have an age related illnesses that the adult population sometimes get. But they also have underlying psychiatric illness, which sometimes can be pretty active within the facility. But I'm just basically here to let you know that we're trying the Hemi sync and this is this is our story. We're gonna tell you what we've experienced, and basically what we want to do down the road. So we're going to ask hopefully, let us know if you have any ideas or we'll be open to any suggestions about things we could try as well. 04:34 You know, SAS Mountain was started in 19. One It was first thought of to be camp for TB patients. And that went into like for six years, they added the spring house and they added an infirmary, things like that, when in 19. Seven, they changed it to the Mont Alto Sanitarium. And we had on centennial celebration last year. And I found out something that I didn't know about it was that in 1918, and 1922, there were a lot of the World War One vets that had been exposed to mustard gas. And that was South Mountain was the place to send them to recuperate. And in 1956, they named the center Samuel Dixon Center, after the doctor that was there for just about his whole life, I guess. When in 1965, we started to get our first mental hospital patients. And that's mainly what we have now. In No, I came in 19. At that time, there were over 900 residents there. And now we're down to two, like we've been downsizing plus a lot of the our patients have been accepted out into group homes and out into the community, and there's a big push, you know, to get get them out into the mainstream. Then they started to decide, they decided that they were going to close the state institutions. And we got most of our residents then, because they close the long term care. And we got most of the elderly residents at one time, the median age, maybe 10 years ago, at South Mountain was 75. Now, it's our population has kind of gotten younger, because we've gotten a few people in that are very young, we have some in their 30s or 40s. And that kind of, you know, brings the age median age down to about 65. So now we're sort of in another transitional kind of a period it seemed that was the antibiotic started curing TB, and they got treatments. Fortunately, those patients who went down were all about the same time is when the mental hospitals work at like 108% capacity. So they made South Mountain and Western Western in was located at close to Pittsburgh, they were the only two long term care facilities in Pennsylvania, that were state run. And now we are the only one that's there. Any of the mental hospital patients that need long term care come to us, we do try to place them into some range from being competent, and able to make their own medical decisions, make manage their own money, things like that, to ones will be hands, who are what they call a vegetable vegetable. On sixth floor, we are mainly very medically involved. A lot of the residents get half 1010 12 diagnoses besides their psychiatric diagnosis, when they're in the state mental facilities, the mental illness is primary, but then it gets moved to the bottom of the list so they can go to South Mountain, it's sort of a little trick that they do. And we always say that it's off when you go from route 30, which is down on the main road. And our facility is just like this, we're on the top of the mountain. And it's we say, you know, it's just that short trip up there six miles up road trip to 33, that purism and they're no longer mentally ill. But then you know, they come and we kind of get them oriented to the place and then all of a sudden we find out that they're exhibiting some of these really bad behaviors that somebody says, Where did that come from? And we have a lot of people that are on psychotropic medications. And there's always somebody some regulating agency of some kind in there, checking the charts, checking the meds. And it's always Can't you get these people off the psychrotrophic drugs, we have to discharge these people, we need to get them out in the community. And that's when we start having problems. 09:13 Yes, and since it's always the new kid on the block, and I said, Wow, this, it's clean, smells great. It's a little looking but everything looks to be working. Okay. So get my hand handed over to like a six months. Almost a year, almost a year. Learning this now. No. Anyway, so the hill a lot of evaluations piled up, because we were required through obrah to go ahead and make sure you have physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy in the facility. So I come in and there's almost no people for me to to evaluate. And again, I have worked a mental health to this degree. So I would see someone and say, they look pretty good. Very good. We're going for be great. So we go ahead and do the evaluation and maybe put him down for one or two weeks just for observation. And the next day, they're catatonic. And honestly, amazed, you know, the PowerPoint, you'll like on here, you know, Hidden Dragon, Crouching Tiger. But then she says, Oh, that's normal. Wow. So it took me a while to finally figure out what to expect or, more more, a better term will be, how not to be so surprised, as to try to keep your expectations low. So you will be happily surprised. So some of the reasons why we started the program, the Hemi sync 11:07 was like Judy has stated, they started downsizing the population out there, the South Mountain, before I gotten there, even the time when God was there, before God was there, it was a self sufficient facility. They used to have their own farm used to grow their own food, and in his times changed the sort of discharging one of the higher level individuals. So again, the reason why Hemi sync, again went for Su it was one, the Mohyla individuals were being discharged out. So we had to find a way of working the programs for those who are present. Second of all, our new admissions were not coming in higher level either. They were individuals who are very, very debilitated. Again, these individuals, not only having the mental illness or psychiatric diagnosis, they've had their post stroke, they've had Parkinson's disease. So they now have contractures, positioning problems, bedsores, whatever, where they will other facility come into. So you can't wait dialogue with some of these people on a measurable I'm saying measurable way because we're under Medicare. And they want measurable terms, they want something that you can say, well, this the dialogue back and this is how many times they initiate a conversation, these individuals want to do that. The thing that was a driving force for me was I pretty much had evaluated all the individuals who needed physical disabilities, and no problem with that. But there were always those individuals who were in the back of the activity room who were placed here to participate. But he didn't really seem to connect, what was cool is going on, you know, you have a TV going on, and you have music playing and maybe screaming and yelling, you know, and it's it's not a reflection of their direct care, because they were taking care of what's the best way they knew how they were, they were cleaned. They were being fed, they had no breakdown, but there was no connection being made. And that was another motivating force for me to find and use Hemi sync 13:37 basically, how we started to screens individuals before we try and we had to have assistance. So again, this is a state system, a lot of red tape. You know, I learned the hard way, you know, I'm starting stuff out doing this doing that. And so it's it's pretty watching, someone's gonna put a grievance on you. grievance. Unions unions for care? You bet you bet. So you gotta be careful yet. Again, if you want to make results, you got to know the rules of the game. So basically, we had to do was go ahead and meet with the, I guess you want to call it the medical health services board, which was made up or the enhanced physicians with about three or four of them, and the medical medical health service director. And it was sort of funny, because I went up and I come up with a big boombox. So here's what I want to do. Here we can rediscover the woofer here, and What's he trying to do? You know, as he goes, this is what I try. Okay. I gave wonderful stuff on the internet from phenomenons to given packets. My hope they read it. They didn't do badly last year. Chance. So here's your chance to experience it. So basically, we want to go ahead and let this residents get involved this way, because right now what we're trying to do is our traditional ways, is not working, it isn't working as well as we want it to. So I play the Hemi sync. And ironically, there was a Catholic priest on the board to call guy and he says you're not gonna listen on my territory. This is this is really just to help relax. So they pretty much said, Well, no one's ever got hurt from it. So we'll just play it and see what happens. So we're pretty cool with that. The next thing we had to do was go ahead and go to