Recover from Brain Injuries with Physical Therapy

Increasing people are talking about brain problems and cures, for everything from football concussions to soldiers returning from the battlefield. The focus is fabulous, and now new treatments are coming to the fore that may help people recover. One new method is known as Neurodevelopmental Therapy (or NDT). This can be used in occupational, speech, language and physical therapies, including therapy for children with special needs.

Basically, NDT is a way to look at issues on a very personal level. Physical therapists use hands-on methods and advanced equipment to guide patients through activities. For example, think of a kid who can't grab a fork might set a goal to do it. The physical therapist might guide the patient through picking up the hand, reaching for the fork and recognizing how it feels and then using the fingers and thumb to grab. It's all step by step, and hands-on from beginning to end.

NDT is patient-driven, because they have to set goals. For children with special needs, families play a role. For adult patients dealing with issues like stroke or TIB, the goal might be learning to reach to a shelf without losing balance. Elite physical therapists who have used these strategies say that a patient's perception of treatment makes a huge difference in their healing processes.

In addition to feeling like it's working, NDT truly works. Professionals in the field report that need less help and fewer devices while achieving an improvement in proper positioning. Improvement is possible in speech, eating, movement and other occupational therapy tasks.

For kids with special needs, physical therapists can use NDT to help with things that will make these individuals less dependent on others. This can include learning to support oneself, climb stairs, or even crawl or stand. The best pediatric physical therapists believe that some degree of improvement is realistic for almost any patient, even those with severe disabilities.

The body of research on NDT isn't very thorough, but the topic isn't really being challenged. Many of the research papers were about small groups of patients, so aren't widely generalizable. But the ideas are pretty commonsense and a growing number of physical therapists for kids with special needs and other specialists are trying it.

If you're facing difficult problems with speech, eating and mobility, consider finding a autism symptoms in toddlers San Diego CA expert to help.

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