Deans' stroke musings: Mirror Therapy for Improving Motor Function After Stroke

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, December 25, 2012

Mirror Therapy for Improving Motor Function After Stroke

You are going to have to get your doctor/therapist to interpret to derive some sort of stroke protocol from this. Acute vs. chronic; one movement vs. multiple, frequency, speed. Good luck with that. Or ask your stroke association which should have copies of all stroke protocols. But once again they will fail you.
This is the full article so ask your therapist for help.
http://stroke.ahajournals.org/content/44/1/e1.full
One paragraph here;

Implications for Practice

This review indicates that mirror therapy could be applied at least as an additional intervention in the rehabilitation of patients after stroke, but no clear conclusion can be drawn if mirror therapy should replace other interventions for improving motor function. Furthermore, mirror therapy may improve activities of daily living, but the results must be interpreted with caution because they are based on only four studies. For patients with a complex regional pain syndrome following stroke, mirror therapy seems to be an effective intervention, both for improving motor function and reducing pain. Mirror therapy seems not to influence pain in unselected stroke patients.(And what the hell does that mean?)