What is a Stroke?
Stroke is one such disorder that is responsible for a high number of mortality throughout the world. It is defined as an acute onset of focal neurological disorder. This means that there is an impairment of the body functions, due to an interruption in the blood supply to the brain. Stroke may be of two types namely Ischemic stroke and Hemorrhagic stroke.
Physiotherapy is actually a boon for people who are recovering from stroke/paralysis.
In this article, Physiorevive will discuss some tips and tricks that would help you gain better results post physiotherapy exercises, in order to recover from your paralysis.
Exercises Tips and Tricks for Stroke Patients
Symptoms of Stroke
So, first thing first the family members of the stroke patients should know how to figure out if the physiotherapy exercises which are being carried out by the patients are actually helping them or not.
In order to get an answer to this, you should check who gets more tired while the exercise session is going on, the patient or the person who is helping the patient to carry out the exercises. Now, it’s very obvious that if the patient is not doing the required efforts, there would be no/delayed recovery. It is important here to understand that in reality, there is no problem with the patient’s body.
It’s just that his mind has lost control of the particular segment of the body. Hence, the part of the body has become too weak to respond. Therefore, if by any chance you are practicing only those exercises which will involve too much of your hand and leg movement, then it won’t take you very far. This is because it won’t affect your brain.
Role of Caregiver in Exercise
Let’s try to understand this in a better way by using an example. For example, a person whose left body is paralyzed would not be able to move his left hand. In such cases, the caregivers are taught to practice some tough exercises on patients.
This includes folding and bending of fingers, elbows, and shoulders. Now, first and foremost this kind of exercise has almost no investment of effort from the patients. All the effort is coming only from the caregiver.
So, in a way, we can say that it’s not the patient who is doing the exercise but the caregiver. Also, in this case, it is important to understand and remember that such kinds of bending and folding exercises should not be prescribed to stroke patients.
Again, as mentioned earlier this will not bring any improvement to the patient’s brain. So, what is the solution here?
Solution of Stroke Disease
Well, the solution is that we must choose such exercises which will cause limb movement as well as the improvement of the brain. Let’s take the same example again, so to begin with you can apply some amount of oil to the hands of the stroke patient.
And, then you ask the patient to apply the same on his own in his hair. You can provide additional support, but in this exercise unlike the other one patients’ functional and psychological efforts are involved.
In this exercise, we can see that patient is moving his hand, elbow, neck fingers, etc, and also he is utilizing his brain to carry out these activities. Now, as we can see this activity unlike the other has a lot of active movements to offer.
So, the conclusion of the whole story here is that in the case of patients dealing with a stroke you should avoid passive movements and indulge more in activities that involve active movements. When a patient recovering from a stroke is practicing passive movements, of course, his brain does not get reactivated but his upper and lower limbs also develop a weird kind of tightness. And when you apply a force against this tightness, the body parts of the patients would simply get stiffer.
Conclusion:-
Doing physiotherapy exercises alone to recover from a stroke is not sufficient. But ensure, that it is done in the correct way and establishing an accurate impact on the required body part is important.