Brain Injury Rehabilitation
What brain injuries are treated with physical rehabilitation?
The most common brain injury that a physiatrist would be involved with would be a stroke, somebody that has had a blood clot that has traveled through their circulation to their brain and has cut off the supply of oxygen to one area of their brain. That will lead to significant physical problems as well as cognitive problems. This is very common also in brain tumors, folks that have had tumors and a surgeon has removed the tumor from their brain, often they are left with some sort of a deficit in their physical abilities or in their cognitive abilities and a physiatrist would be intimately involved in restoring that function if possible. Aneurisms are another brain injury that Physiatrist could be involved with if you had a blood vessel that burst inside your brain, the presence of the blood in the brain tissue will injure that tissue and cause some deficits in physical abilities or concentration abilities and this is another type of brain injury that a physiatrist could help you with restoring your functioning and quality of life.
How can physical rehabilitation help me recover from a brain injury?
If you've had a brain injury from something such as a stroke, a tumour, an aneurysm, or even a traumatic brain injury from a car accident, a physiatrist, or a physical medicine and rehabilitation medical doctor would evaluate your specific limitations from the brain injury. Are you having physical limitations? Are you having visual limitations or limitations in swallowing, concentration, or memory? They would design a therapy programme that may involve a physical therapist, a speech therapist, a neuropsychologist, or an occupational therapist. They would design a programme to treat each of those individual limitations and help you restore functioning, or teach you compensatory techniques if they realize that you're not going to walk in the same way that you walked before. They would, with the therapist's help, teach you a new way in which you could walk or a new way in which you could be mobile and live your life.
