Control

Amy Shissler
My Cerebellar Stroke Recovery

February 20, 2015

Hi everyone. :-) Long time no talk. My plan was to take a break from blogging for a month or 2 as I build back up a semi-normal life but Dean f’ed up my plan by e-mailing me and asking me a question that I kinda thought was brilliant so I had to write a post about it. I asked Dean for his permission to share this so HIPPA police stay away from me. He asked about a foot issue that he is having, that it’s landing wrong during the gait cycle. Then he asked for exercises that would further increase the offending motion and in my orthopedic PT brain I thought “uhh why would he want to do that?” He told me that “I want to work on both inward and outward motion because I think doing both will cause neuroplasticity to take place faster.”

Brilliant!

Yes, I totally agree. Oh man. So Dean’s issue is that when he walks his foots lands wrong and turns outward. For an orthopedic issue – well let’s just get the opposite muscle really strong and fix the motion. For a neuro issue, can’t think like that. It makes so much sense what Dean proposed – to work on the motion that’s bad and causing the issue and gain more control over it. Gain more control, and then….well you’ll be able to control it better and in turn hopefully decrease the problem. So, the motion that’s causing him the issue is that due to his spasticity, his left foot hits the ground in a position of eversion. It doesn’t land straight forward like a good foot should.

So he asked me for exercises that would further force it to turn outward, and I was thinking, “whaaaaa?” And then a few seconds later I thought it was genius of him to come up with that.

See the original article:

Control

in

My Cerebellar Stroke Recovery