How many hours of therapy do you need to do to recover from a stroke?
Malcolm Gladwell's highly popular book, Outliers, estimates 10,000 hours as the time it takes to become a high-level athlete or musician.
First you would need to accurately know how many muscles were affected by your stroke, split between just damaged in the penumbra and the dead ones. I'm sure your neurologist has no f*cking clue as to the answer to that question.
The damaged ones are the only ones counted here
The grand total
Well, this is how I calculate it. We have …
- 200 muscles that might get discussed in a gym
- 100 more muscles that are pretty obscure, but any self-respecting massage therapist still knows about them
- 400 more muscles that are really danged obscure, but various
specialists know about them, and a handful of them are of special
interest
- several million hair-raising muscles
- several billion smooth muscles cells blended together
- exactly 1 heart muscle
So I’m going to go with a grand total of approximately 50,100,000,701 muscles, accurate to within 99%.
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Let's say you blew out all of your motor cortex on one side and taking the first three bullets that would mean 350 muscles needing retraining.
I'll make it simple and assume that there is one specific exercise for each muscle, Think of body builders and what they do to get that definition.
350 * 10,000 = 3.5 million hours needed to totally recover.
24 hours a day * 365 days = 8760 hours in a year
If you worked constantly all year you might be able to recover one muscle
3.5m/8760 = 399.54 years before you are completely recovered and you are not going to be able to ever sleep again. Lots of Red Bulls for you.
And do you really think your therapist has stroke protocols for each voluntary muscle in the body?
This is why the rehabilitation silo as currently set up is not where the solution to stroke recovery is. The solution is preventing neuronal death in the first week. Then rehabilitation might have a chance to get people to recovery.
I look forward to therapists and neurologists around the world telling me exactly why I'm wrong and providing exact calculations for recovery. That'll be the day, by Buddy Holly.
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