Your Complete Guide to the Rehabilitation Therapy

Table of contents

00.

Intro

Patients suffering from issues such as stroke, cardiac arrest, or major surgery often have to go through Rehabilitation Therapy to help them recover. Neurofeedback Therapy can also be used for rehabilitation either on its own or as part of a wider treatment plan.

Rehabilitation Therapy is also used to help patients recover from addictions to substances such as drugs, alcohol, and even food addiction.

Neurofeedback is particularly useful when treating these kinds of disorders because it can teach patients to break bad habits by influencing brain function.

In either case, the aim of Rehabilitation Therapy is to help patients get back to a relatively normal, independent, and high standard of living free from pain, impairments, or addictions. It can also be used to train patients to improve their capacity for mobility, speech, or cognition.

Leave Chronic Pain Behind

01.

What is Rehabilitation Therapy (RT)?

The medical definition for Rehabilitation Therapy is “a set of medical interventions that are designed to optimise functioning and reduce disability in patients with various health conditions.”

In most cases, RT aims to help patients become independent and engage in meaningful and useful activities in life.

When you think of rehabilitation, you immediately think of physical therapists, speech and language therapists, and occupational therapists. However, the definition is much broader than this. For example, a psychologist helping a patient recover from depression is a therapist offering mental RT.

There are many different types of RT depending on the condition being treated and the techniques used to treat it.

02.

Types of Rehabilitation Therapy

There are three main types of rehabilitation therapy: occupational, physical, and speech therapy. Each of these addresses a different facet of life, but they can all be caused by a wide range of medical problems including:

Musculoskeletal injuries such as broken bones.
Spinal cord injury.
Brain injury such as traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Multi-trauma injuries after accidents.
Brain disorders and neurological conditions such as PTSD, epilepsy, ADHD, depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue.

Rehabilitation therapy takes care of all these problems in the following ways.

1. Physical Therapy

This is a type of Rehabilitation Therapy that involves movement, strength, stability, and functional ability. It can also be used to reduce pain through various targeted exercises.

2. Occupational Therapy

This is a type of therapy that helps patients recover the ability to perform their daily activities independently. That can include walking, personal hygiene, eating, and income-generating activities.

Occupational therapy mainly tries to help patients regain motor skills, restore balance, or learn how to use adaptive equipment such as prosthetics to increase their functional ability. Children with disabilities and seniors with degenerative conditions often have to go through OT.

3. Speech Therapy

Speech therapy aims at overcoming a wide range of speech impediments involving language, voice, swallowing, and talking fluency.

Some common conditions that require speech therapy include cerebral palsy, lisping, cleft palate, Down’s syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and some types of cancer. Speech therapy can be achieved through language drills, articulation exercises, jaw exercises, among others.

4. Recreation or Vocational Rehabilitation

These are types of RT are made necessary due to underlying mental illness or serious physical disability. They rely heavily on psychologists and psychiatrists as they help patients with socialisation.

5. Cognitive Behavior Rehabilitation

Also called psychological rehabilitation, this type of Rehabilitation Therapy is usually necessary when a person has had a serious head injury or neurological condition that seriously impacts their ability to think, reason, or remember (memory).

6. Drug and Alcohol/Addiction Rehabilitation Therapy

The addicted human brain is a fascinating study. Research shows that a person addicted to drugs has marked functional and neurochemical changes in the brain; these actually show up on EEG brain maps and topographic scans.

Addiction at its basic level is a complex interplay of environmental and biological factors. However, its foundation lies in the reward mechanism of the brain that uses dopamine to reinforce behaviors again and again. People addicted to activities or drugs are actually addicted to the dopamine release associated with that drug or activity.

Neurofeedback Therapy can be used to help addicts recover and retrain the brain into healthy patterns of functioning. It works through the use of brain mapping to identify abnormal function, which can then be targeted using neurofeedback to help treat the addiction.

Since addiction is a learned condition, Neurofeedback rehabilitation can be an immensely useful tool to help patients break the negative feedback cycle of addiction and reinforce healthy habits and brain function.

However, addiction rehabilitation therapy can utilise a number of different therapeutic techniques all designed to help cut a patient’s dependence on a particular substance or activity. These include food addiction, alcohol addiction, substance addiction, gambling addiction, and many more.

03.

Why Do Rehabilitation Therapy?

Rehabilitation therapy is not a luxury, but a critical part of recovery that helps patients recover from serious physical or brain disorders and injuries. Even seemingly innocuous issues such as PTSD, anxiety, and ADHD can require extensive therapy to treat or bring under control.

Those familiar with physical therapy recognise its value as part of a wider treatment plan. Here are a few reasons why patients find it necessary to participate in rehabilitation therapy:

Managing and Treating Chronic Pain

Chronic pain can seriously impact one’s quality of life. However, Rehabilitation Therapy has been shown to significantly reduce suffering from chronic pain through physical therapy, soft tissue and joint mobilisation, and various self-remedies.

Other techniques used to help treat chronic pain include taping, ultrasound, and electrical stimulation. These not only help to treat pain for good, they can also help to restore muscle and joint function.

Restore Activity After Injury

Serious injuries such as broken bones and injured tendons can seriously reduce mobility. For athletes and fitness enthusiasts, injuries can also prevent the patient from fully participating in strenuous activities. RT helps quicken healing, deal with pain, and restore full use of muscles and limbs.

Improve Balance and Coordination

Seniors over 65 and individuals suffering from serious medical conditions such as stroke often have trouble standing or walking. The right type of therapy can help these individuals gain balance, mobility, stability, and strength.

Increase Independence

Patients who suffer from immobilising conditions such as paralysis or serious injuries often have to rely on others for their personal hygiene, feeding, and physical support. Rehabilitation therapy helps them reduce pain and improve mobility.

Increase Self-Confidence and Esteem

Patients suffering from serious mental and physical health issues often have a low sense of self-worth. Psychotherapy and vocation therapy can help them associate normally with society despite their condition.

Break Addictions

Addictions are a debilitating medical issue that can even lead to death. In particular, addiction to substance abuse such as hard drugs and alcohol leads to complete dependence on the drugs, leaving the individual completely unable to function normally.

Rehabilitation Therapy of all types can be used to help patients break this addiction and restore them to a healthy, functioning, and meaningful way of life.

04.

Where Axon Comes in

Neurofeedback Therapy relies on two important technologies to work: EEG for measuring and recording brain activity, and a feedback mechanism to train the brain to adopt good habits.

The feedback mechanism relies on a complicated computer algorithm that sends the right cues at just the right times to influence brain activity.

Here at Exsurgo, we have redefined Neurofeedback Therapy thanks to our revolutionary Axon system. Axon is a miniaturised headset designed and produced by our top neuroscience engineers for advanced EEG brain monitoring and analysis.

Whilst EEGs are typically very complex and expensive machines found in hospitals, Axon is both easy to use and affordable, making it an option for the average consumer as well as medical practices.

What makes it so different is the use of cloud-based technology, which means that the part that does all the heavy lifting (processing EEG data) doesn’t have to be on the Axon headset itself.

With that simple tweak, Axon becomes incredibly easy to use with just a simple mobile app while retaining its medical-grade sensitivity and functionality.

05.

Axon for Neurofeedback Therapy

Anyone suffering from chronic pain, ADHD, PTSD, depression, migraines, and other types of brain disorders can use Axon, either in our clinic or at home to treat themselves using Neurofeedback Therapy.

Axon is particularly attuned to the treatment of chronic pain. After extensive proprietary research and ongoing clinical trials, Axon has shown significant improvements in the intensity of pain.

During the UK clinical trial, Exsurgo’s Axon EEG headset showed a lot of promise in being able to get patients off powerful opiate meds while helping them reclaim their quality of life.

Since neurofeedback therapy is non-invasive and almost free from health risks, the Axon is an exciting option that is open to anyone who wants to heal and transform their life for the better.

06.

Sign Up for a Clinical Trial

Clinical trials on chronic pain treatment using the Axon are still ongoing. The UK trial was successful, and the team at Exsurgo is already working on the Auckland Trials in New Zealand with the Waitemata District Health Board, and later in the US.

If you would like to be part of this exciting opportunity please contact the team at trials@exsurgo.com and we will get back to you.