Deans' stroke musings: Numbing a body part can boost sensory powers elsewhere—here's what that tells us about the brain

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, May 11, 2019

Numbing a body part can boost sensory powers elsewhere—here's what that tells us about the brain

I only copied the stroke section. Your doctor with ANY BRAINS AT ALL, should be able to apply this and get better hand recovery by using this in conjunction with the Margaret Yekutiel book about this from 2001, 'Sensory Re-Education of the Hand After Stroke'?

Or is your doctor irresponsible and knows nothing about this book from 18 years ago? And you are paying them? For what?

Numbing a body part can boost sensory powers elsewhere—here's what that tells us about the brain

Stroke rehabilitation and beyond
These results are exciting as – unlike some past studies – we can actually show that sensory deprivation has different, and separable effects when used by itself, and when used to boost the effects of sensory training.
Crucially, this holds promising implications for rehabilitation following brain damage. For example, sensory function of a hand affected by stroke can be improved by a sensory block of the opposite, unaffected hand. It also helps us understand a popular therapy for stroke that requires the unaffected arm to be bound, forcing use of the affected arm. It may be that this works partly thanks to the sensory and motor deprivation resulting from the "good arm" being bound. If this can be shown to truly be the case, we can use this knowledge to further push what this therapy can achieve.
The research can also help us answer a bigger question in neuroscience. While we show that sensory brain resources can be reallocated within a sensory modality – meaning a finger can use the brain territory of another finger to support touch perception – it remains unclear whether the brain can learn to reuse an area designed to support a different sense. So we still haven't shown whether the vision area of the brain could be used for a completely different purpose. Very new perspectives suggest that this kind of reorganisation might be too extreme, and brain areas are limited to the general functions they were designed for.
While nobody denies that there are changes in brain activity after sensory deprivation, it is unclear whether such changes are necessarily "functional" – affecting how we move, think or behave. But we are certainly edging closer to understanding the complicated brain processes that enable the sensory experiences that ultimately make life worth living.