What else can I do?

There is an inaccuracy in a recent Amazon review of Stronger After Stroke that I must correct... 

BULL

Here is part of the review:

"I have not read the book, but one of the reasons my father in law suffered a stroke was because he's blood pressure was too high due to alcohol consumption. In this book it says it's ok to have 4 oz of alcohol a day so my father in law has started drinking again. So I'm hoping I didn't start up the drinking with him by giving him this book."

Actually, there is no mention of alcohol at all, any place in the book. But the author of the review hadn't read the book, so how would they know?

Here's a part of the story that may be interesting only to me: I contacted Amazon, asking them to consider taking the review down. Amazon will only take down a review "If it in violation of one of Amazon's posted guidelines." One of posted guidelines is: "Customer reviews should be relevant to the product in question." The reviewer is clearly reviewing hearsay, not a book. In any case, I was amazed that Amazon has declined to take the review down. I'm a huge fan of Amazon! I'm disappointed.

I'm not an advocate of drinking after stroke.

Thank you.S

Demanding Repetition

I do a lot of talks on stroke recovery. From Alaska to Florida, from New Hampshire to San Diego I'm all over the place all the time. I do these talks  for therapists; OT, PT, speech. Survivors and their caregivers show up as well. Also, medical device people, nurses, physiatrists, etc. So I get to talk to a lot of people about stroke. I always do the best I can to make things as simple as possible. Here is a really simple but profound way to look at stroke recovery...

Repetitive.
Demanding.

That's it. Repetitive practice of the movement or sound or walking or skill or whatever. Of course repetitive practice has the habit of doing two things: 1) causing people to repeat things that they can do pretty well, over and over. 2) Plateau. People plateau (don't get any better) because they keep doing what they can do pretty well over and over.

That's where demanding comes in. Repeatedly practice the skill in a way that "nips at the edges" of your current ability.

Repetitive without demanding and progress will slow to a crawl.
Demanding without enough repetition will halt progress."the stroke blog" "The stroke recovery blog"

Does "X" aid recovery after stroke?

What works and what doesn't work to help recover after stroke? Research has revealed three broad categories:
1. It works
2. It doesn't work
3. We don't know yet

There is tons we don't know about stroke recovery. Stroke recovery is a million different puzzle pieces, with no picture on the front of the box to help out. But there are some resources to help answer some of the questions (at least)...

There is one website that answers, in layman's terms, what works and what doesn't work. Although the list is far from complete, it's a start. Thank you Canada!

 

stroke blog

stroke blogs

Video games+Tennis balls+ Anger=Recovery

A great article in the British newspaper The Telegraph. The article is by a stroke survivor who recovered well after an ischemic (block) stroke. He's hit on some very core ideas. Here are the most important points (comments in red are mine):

• "...nobody in the hospital was going to tell me how to get better ..."
• "I had to get out of hospital and cure myself."
• "...found that major strides had been made in America in treating stroke victims." (USA! USA! USA!)
• "Research there showed that damaged neural pathways could be re-routed" (Taub! Taub! Taub!)
• "The key was speed. After three or four weeks, the brain seemed to start a permanent shut-down on these pathways." Not true. But the guy is a "High Master" which I think is a principal. He can be forgiven.
• "I decided to bounce a tennis ball 2,000 times a day off the kitchen floor, missed catches not counting." Obsessive repetitive practice. I love it.
• "The first day it took four hours to reach the target." Ambitious repetitive practice.
• "...wrote out the alphabet, one line per letter, for two hours a day." Brilliant, I think the British say.
• "I vowed to (type) 10 pages a day, typing out my corrections on my latest book with one finger. The first 10 pages took three days." I love this guy.
• "I decided to recite the poems of Andrew Marvell for two hours a day..." Fighting aphasia by using something meaningful. This guy may have missed his calling: neuroscience.
• "I marched up and down the stripes on the lawn for two hours a day." Very Monty Python.
• To reestablish I coordination he used "a computer game flying a virtual F15 jet - or, in my case, crashing it thousands of times on the runway before finally landing it - after 40 hours' "flying" time." I think this is great. The idea of doing something fun to recover. When else in the middle of somebody's career are they allowed to play 40 hours of any game?
• "I came close to giving up the grind of rehab. But by choosing tasks like writing the alphabet or counting how many times I could walk down the lawn without crossing a stripe, I could monitor my own progress." Okay, two things: close to giving up. But not giving up. And second: being able to "monitor progress" is essential to recovery because if you don't monitor things closely how do you know if you are getting any better?
• "The difference between success and failure was...a deep anger that I was not offered more help to start with" You know, even Gandhi was not against anger. He just said you should use it wisely because it's very powerful. I'd say using anger to recover from stroke is using anger wisely. 
•  Gandhi on Anger  "I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world." 

Bravo High Master of stroke recovery!

Find the article here.

Stroke Recovery. Are You Up for the Challenge?

Keeping it challenging...

Whatever is practiced, it must be challenging. In research, an 80-percent threshold is generally used. For instance, if a stroke survivor can successfully turn the pages in a magazine 80 percent of the time, the challenge can be increased by turning the pages of a newspaper. Since turning pages of newspaper requires increased excursion of the shoulder and elbow, the increased AROM will "trickle down" to easier tasks such as turning pages in books and magazines, card flipping and laundry folding.

What is usually done

Compensation (learning to "get by" with the "good" side). As "Dean's" puts it: Compensation being doing whatever is necessary to accomplish a goal. Recovery is using the muscles as intended to accomplish the same goal. Insurance wants you to use compensation whenever possible because it is faster and cheaper. 

Faster and cheaper

Faster and cheaper is good because its faster and cheaper. You could go to a State University. Or you could get a degree from a degree mill. You could make a a salad, but you could get the same amount of calories from a pop tart. But even as fast and cheap as they are, you'll still feel gypped.

~