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.