Hemiplegia – Overview

Transcript

The field of stroke care has advanced dramatically over the last decade. The amount of options for care, the ability to remove a clot, restore blood flow, the type of rehabilitation that’s available to patients after a stroke. But even with all of these advances, we have enormous number of patients across the United States and around the world who are left with a degree of Hemiplegia. Hemiplegia is the result of a stroke or brain injury that causes the opposite side of the body to lose function, to develop hypertonicity or spasticity causing the muscles to be tight, the arm to drop and the fist to clench, the foot and ankle to turn in, impairing a patient’s ability to walk or use their hand for such basic functions as even feeding themselves or writing on paper. Once a patient has done everything that they can do to recover this with physical therapy, with medications to reduce the spasticity, with bracing, they often are left with a sub optimal function of both limbs on that side of the body. And what seems to be not common knowledge is that there are a number of surgical procedures that are available to improve that function.