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.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Chronic rehab After a Stroke

From a study in the UK. The last two paragraphs are here and very disappointing.

Chronic rehab After a Stroke


What should we deduce from this?
The results of this study are, quite frankly, disappointing. Of course, the therapy was being tested in patients one year, at least, after their stroke. However, the participants were typical of those sent for physical therapy, and the type of therapy given was ‘routine’. The investigators make a revealing statement in their publication. They report that, in interviews with the patients in the ‘treatment’ group, they found that patients were thankful for the therapy, but felt that it was not designed to help them with their practical difficulties with day-to-day activities.

New thinking about the possible ways stroke patients might restore damaged or destroyed nervous tissue connections suggest the need for very intensive, long-lasting stimulation. Such a degree of stimulation is hardly likely to occur in routine therapy sessions. New approaches are required – balance, strength and endurance training, simple task repetition, group therapy, and family involvement – as well as ‘therapy’ for several (many?) hours a day. A new concept, forced-use therapy (also called constraint-induced movement therapy — see link below) is just such a technique that deserves wider trials. It doesn’t make sense for HMOs (or other health providers) to continue to pay for therapy that is not clearly very effective, when there may be other more useful, but less traditional, approaches.

What should we learn from this?
That we have to reduce the amount of damage by stopping the neuronal cascade of death. Existing treatments are failing and until we acknowledge that we aren't going to support survivors in the best way.

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