Deans' stroke musings: Interest and costs of neurorehabilitation of brain injury patients

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.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Interest and costs of neurorehabilitation of brain injury patients

It doesn't say anything useful in the abstract and I'm not going to buy the complete article in French.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21634145?dopt=Abstract

[Article in French]

Mühl A, Vuadens P.

Source

Clinique romande de réadaptation (SuvaCare), Av. Grand Champsec 90, 1951 Sion. andreas.muehl@crr-suva.ch

Abstract

The severity of the initial deficit and the improvement in the first weeks are the strongest indicators for a favorable outcome after stroke. Meta-analyses attempt to evaluate the efficacy of neurorehabilitation, but the results are unconclusive due to the heterogeinity of the groups of patients and therapies. However, there is sufficient data to conclude that repetitive, high intensity, task orientated training is efficacious. New approaches (mental imagery, robotics, virtual therapies...) are also useful but are not better than physiotherapy. It is as important to individualize the approach in a multidisciplinary well organised and communicative setting and to treat early complications. Cerebral plasticity is an individualized process and limited in time, so therapy should be regularly adapted and stopped if the deficit remains stable. Oh I disagree! The statement is made with no scientific backing. This individualization is a copout. So is multidisciplinary.

By using the word task-oriented they are falling into the common trap of only working on therapies for damaged neurons, not the therapy needed to recover functionality from the dead brain area. These researchers really need a survivor to tell them where they are going wrong.