The Healing Power Of Exercise.

I read a very interesting article about the part exercising plays in the rehabilitation of paralysis, including with quadriplegic’s. I quote:

Christopher Reeve, who in 2002, seven years after he was paralyzed, began feeling light touch and pin pricks and regained some motor function after making exercise a hallmark of his rehabilitation.

Reeve’s workout regime included a bicycle that uses electrical stimulation to contract the leg muscles and help them to pedal, a treadmill that simulates walking, and underwater resistance training in a pool. A research team, led by neurologist John McDonald, published a paper crediting the activity-based therapy with much of Reeve’s improvement. The actor died in 2004.

The underlying premise is that even quadriplegics have to “use it or lose it.” If a paralyzed person never tries to move, any neural connections remaining between the brain and the spinal cord atrophy and essentially get turned off. Exercise those limbs, and the connections may be restored.

Some researchers believe the spinal circuitry alone can be retrained to control walking through “sensory patterned feedback” - using treadmills or other devices to break down walking movements and repeat them again and again.

A lot of people are unaware of this as an option - the standard health care answer for this kind of paralysis is learning to live with it - and people tend often to leave it at that.

This is very unfortunate because as Dr Wise Young, a leading spinal cord injury researcher says:

 activity-based therapy “is not some kind of miraculous pie-in-the-sky thing. This is real stuff,”

For the entire article go here