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.

Monday, November 16, 2015

Robots, video games, and a radical new approach to treating stroke patients.

We need more innovative people like this in stroke rather than the moribund fossils in our stroke associations. So instead of your therapist asking you if you are tired and want to quit, they should be driving you to exhaustion every session. An excellent example of what a protocol should look like.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/helping-hand-annals-of-medicine-karen-russell
A couple of fascinating paragraph from here:
Stroke-induced injury to the brain may have a silver lining, neurologically speaking. The tissue death that results from stroke appears to trigger a self-repair program in the brain. For between one and three months, the brain enters a growth phase of molecular, physiological, and structural change that in some ways resembles the brain environment of infancy and early childhood. The brain becomes, as one researcher told me, “exquisitely sensitive to our behavior.” What follows is a sort of “G.P.S. recalculating” period. Networks of brain cells begin to reroute around the stroke lesion, and neurons adjacent to the lesion start to take over some of the dead cells’ functions. S. Thomas Carmichael, a neuroscientist and neurologist at U.C.L.A., compared the period of plasticity to the explosion of seedlings after a forest fire: it’s a fecund time, but those shoots are tender, vulnerable, easily damaged. He cautioned that it’s essential to harness that growth. “You wouldn’t turn this growth phase on and plunk somebody in front of the television to binge-watch ‘Modern Family,’ ” he joked.
But, for many patients, that is essentially what happens. A 2004 University of Melbourne study, titled “Inactive and Alone,” showed that, in the early weeks of acute-stroke care, most patients spend fifty-three per cent of their time in their hospital beds. According to a later study, stroke patients who receive physical therapy for their paretic arm make, on average, thirty-two reaches per session. When neuroscientists perform studies on post-stroke mice, rats, and monkeys, the animals are required to make as many as four hundred to five hundred reaches per session. “Around thirty reaches per rehab session is having no impact on impairment,” Krakauer said. “We are providing physical therapy at homeopathic doses.”
Another problem, Krakauer said, is that patients are being prematurely made to learn compensatory strategies. They lean heavily on their good side to get out of bed, to get to the toilet, to wash and feed themselves. As one neurologist described it, learning such strategies can mean “the difference between having someone wipe your butt and wiping your own butt.” But Krakauer worries that the accommodations that make a patient more independent in the short term actually “stamp in suboptimal strategies.” True recovery, for Krakauer, would mean that a patient was able to move her paretic arm as she did before the stroke.

1 comment:

  1. Dean,
    I read the whole story and and this approach to chronic stroke makes a lot of sense to me. I closely fit the profile of who they are trying to help.

    I get excited about this type of research, because I think it would really help me achieve the amount & type of movement with intention needed to rewire my brain, but I am frustrated that it will be years before this type of thing is really available.

    ReplyDelete