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During that period, occupational therapy increasingly aligned with the medical model, emphasizing the body's mechanical aspects. Practitioners prioritized biomechanical analysis—measuring and addressing strength, range of motion, endurance, and movement patterns—with interventions focused on restoring physical function through exercises, splints, and other manual means. This shift tended to de-emphasize engaging clients in meaningful daily activities as the central route to rehabilitation, favoring quantified impairment-focused assessment and remediation.

This focus on biomechanics fits the era’s move toward a more clinically and impairment-oriented framework. It isn’t about returning to occupation as the sole emphasis, nor about abandoning daily activities entirely in favor of administrative work, and it doesn’t reflect those broader organizational shifts.