A section of chapter 2 in Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
This is where your doctor and probably everyone associated with stroke is failing. Has your doctor EVER stopped to consider why so few of their patients recover fully. If they will not consider what needs to change to get better results then you need to call them out on that. 'What did you learn from not getting me to full recovery in order to better serve your next patient?' Since they didn't do that starting 50 years ago you were screwed from the start. Everything in stroke is a F*CKING FAILURE because of not following this simple idea.
Dean, From my perspective as caregiver, I see insurance companies tying hands of physicians, therapists, and others in the medical field. The vulture lawyers are another limiting factor in recovery. If you had a blank check what would you do to get fully recovered? Become a medical tourist? Try experimental drug cocktails? The limits of our collective knowledge on brain science is but just a thimble full from and ocean, A PhD from the Allen Institute for Brain Science said " If understanding the brain is a mile journey then we are about 3 inches along". Others have said "we don't even know what types of machines to invent to help us understand how the brain works.
ReplyDeleteMD's are ego driven. They don't want to fail when helping the patient.
If I had a blank check it still wouldn't do much good to get fully recovered because right now there are no repeatable ways to recover. This is because we don't know exactly how to make neuroplasticity repeatable, i.e. We don't know what it takes to tell a neighboring neuron to take on a task. The solution is not in rehab, you have to get earlier in the process and stop the damage from occurring during the first week, the neuronal cascade of death. A lot of this is because our stroke medical professionals believe in the stupid meme; 'All strokes are different, all stroke recoveries are different'. It is used as an excuse for why they can't help us recover. And until our SMPs acknowledge that there are lots of problems to solve in stroke will we ever get changes. That is why I absolutely hate the F.A.S.T. campaign, it allows the stroke world to present lies as truth, i.e. getting fast to a stroke hospital will have you be able to reverse the stroke.
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