Deans' stroke musings: Are traditional Thai therapies better than conventional treatment for stroke rehabilitation? A quasi-experimental study

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, February 15, 2014

Are traditional Thai therapies better than conventional treatment for stroke rehabilitation? A quasi-experimental study

Its written up in a quackery/woo magazine so that's one strike against the supposed results.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876382014000122

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eujim.2014.01.011

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Abstract

Introduction

Worldwide, stroke is the principal cause of adult disability and second leading cause of death. Traditional and complementary therapies such as yoga, tai chi, massage and herbal therapies are widely used to treat a variety of illnesses in developing countries and recent research has shown that they may be of some benefit in stroke rehabilitation.

Materials and Methods

A quasi-experimental controlled before-and-after study that recruited 40 stroke patients from Thung Bo Paen rehabilitation centre (treatment group) and Lampang hospital (control group), located in Northern Thailand. Measures included activities of daily living (ADLs), Barthel Index scores, and pain, emotion and sleep scores.

Results

There was a statistically significant difference between the changes in Barthel Index scores in patients from the two treatment locations, where patients from Thung Bo Paen showed greater improvement compared to patients from Lampang hospital (p = 0.020). However, there were no significant differences between the changes in pain scores (p = 0.492), emotion scores (0.671) or sleep scores (p = 0.197) in patients from the two treatment locations.

Conclusions

Patients receiving traditional Thai therapies had significant improvements in ADLs at 3 months compared to conventional treatments. Future research on the use of traditional Thai therapies for stroke recovery should be conducted using a RCT, to avoid biases such as the differences in baseline measures, and should also contain an evaluation of cost, because if both approaches are shown to be equivalent, the next issue to be addressed is which approach is less expensive.