Deans' stroke musings: task-oriented vs compensation oriented 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.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

task-oriented vs compensation oriented stroke rehab

This is one of the failings of the therapy providers, they don't tell you the difference and ask which you would prefer. I talk about it here - http://oc1dean.blo

gspot.com/2011/08/improving-poststroke-recovery.html
and here - http://oc1dean.blogspot.com/2010/10/compensation-vs-recovery.html
Peter Levine posts about it here - http://recoverfromstroke.blogspot.com/2010/11/make-them-walk-funny-and-look-lousy-in.html
And since my arm recovery has almost no usable tasks I have to break down movements into very small pieces. One of the tasks that my OT had as a goal was forward reaching and grasping. I can't even get close to doing that in free space, but if I wrap my hand around a railing I can push my whole body away, I need resistance in order to trigger the ability. So some of my exercises consist of lying in bed with my left arm at 90 degrees to my body and forearm upright and straightening out my arm 1-25 times before I go to sleep. I have a fair amount of spasticity to overcome. And some times I just work on the last three inches of straightening the arm. These small movements don't show up in any therapy protocols because researchers and therapists have taken the easy way out and just worked on hemiparesis recovery rather than figuring out how hemiplegia recovery could take place.