Deans' stroke musings: Brewing and stroke rehab

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Brewing and stroke rehab

I added a few lines to this and deleted the old post
I brew homemade beer. This is a multi-step process, First you boil 3 gallons of water with selected grains, malt extract and hops(wort), cool it down to 70 degrees to allow yeast to survive, add two gallons of water. The proper way to cool down the wort is to set the 5 gal. kettle in the sink with rafts of ice cubes. There is no way I can do this with a barely useable left arm/hand. So I siphon it into the fermenting bucket, filled with ice water. This of course introduces the possibility of contamination, but allows me to do this part by myself. The fermentation continues for 3-4 weeks and then is transferred to a glass carboy for final fermenting and settling of solids. Two weeks later after fermentation is done, the yeasties have eaten most of the sugar, turning it into alcohol. Siphon it to a bottling bucket, add 3/4 cup of sugar - This is to give the leftover yeasties something to chew on and carbonate the beer in the bottles. Bottles are filled and capped. I ask a friend over for this because the capper I have is a two-handed affair and it would take me forever to get it all done. The 5 gallons makes 48-50 bottles of beer. For the first 2 years I refrained from any alcohol because I thought it might slow up my recovery. Then I realized that recovery was going extremely slow anyway and I might as well enjoy a few brews during it. The current batch is raspberry and cherry stout.
This is all about compensation rather than doing tasks to help recovery.
This article

Alcohol Consumption and Functional Outcome After Stroke in Men

at http://stroke.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/41/1/141
Selected lines are as follows:
A meta-analysisfound that consuming less than 1 drink per day was associatedwith a significantly reduced risk of stroke compared to nondrinkers.
Light-to-moderate alcohol consumptionhas been associated with reduced risk of total and ischemicstroke. However, data on the relationship between alcohol consumptionand functional outcomes from stroke are sparse.
Don't consider this an endorsement of alcohol being good for your recovery.
Ask your doctor for guidance on this. Women you are on your own, sorry.