A old FB post on stroke rehab

 My musing on stroke rehabilitation:

The other day i went to teach a bunch of PT students (UG and PG) stroke rehabilitation. Before starting of the speech i had a bad feeling, except for a few none of them had seen a person with stroke.

In the morning they were all listening patiently when i was trying to set them up for rehabilitation of gait in stroke in the afternoon. They all seem to listening- well some of them were sleeping and others were thinking when he will close his mouth. Come the end of the morning session – i was trying to say if you want to improve walking- walk ( if you want to swim- swim- and not go to the gym for learning to swim). Some of them got agitated- what –so no practical’s on how to reduce spasticity- well in the first hour itself i have been talking on the difficulties i reducing spasticity in stroke and the faultily of the endeavour. So why are we hear? So if we are just going to make him walk what is the need for PT? What about “Roods, Bobath, Brunstrom” etc- These were some of the questions.

similar post i Recent saw in an a forum for PT in FB- (http://www.facebook.com/groups/162812190434246/) with similar theme – that is similar to the question- for ecelecctive approach by some PT who claims he has done his method on 600 patients and it is the way to go forward. When someone asks for evidence he gives the usual crap.

It got me thinking- why are we so wound up into thinking we are the saviours of our people- without us they can’t do anything. Why do we think if it is active exercise – it is not PT driven treatment. What is our fascination with “hands on” treatment? Why do we need to refer to some old horrible techniques and rehash as something new?

So what is my take on all these things? Primarily we should stop saying the H word- “hands on” especially when it comes to neuro and a Post graduate course. PTs should stop claiming some crap written when most of were not born to be some fantastic and brilliant technique. We should stop ourselves from teaching this nonsense and move towards teaching science or evidence based treatment. On eccelctic approach- well if we add 5 peoples garbage- you will still have garbage not briyani . Stop saying PROM as an exercise- no dummy that is time pass (again refer to any forum of PT). Stop saying all the crap and move towards science

love

Hariohm