Traumatic Brain Injury – Therapies

Transcript

“We are learning a lot about the therapies that are utilized in order to bring a brain back to its normal state or its near normal state after concussion. And first of all, instead of going to therapies for one hour at a time or several hours at a time, it’s best to put the therapy in a 15 to 20 minute increment, which goes along with the brain fatigue after a mild concussion. The first one would probably be speech pathology and many people say, “”well, why am I going to that? I think I’m speaking okay.”” Well it’s a little bit more than that. It’s also helping you process information from the environment and being able to get all parts of the brain working at the same time. The second therapy may be occupational therapy and that’s fine motor control, or we’re looking at spatial orientations mapping skills.

Many of these skills require multiple parts of the brain to be working in tandem and working together. And the therapy really helps you be able to do that. And then lastly, we would have physical therapy and physical therapy is kind of the gross motor movements. Being able to use your arms and your legs to maintain a balance, to not get dizzy when you do the activity. So all of these sound kind of simple to somebody who hasn’t sustained a concussion or TBI, but to those of us who have, they can be very, very helpful at restarting the brain.”