Therapists ask me what therapies have worked in my rehab. I can understand why because they want to add that therapy to their roster of abilities.

Survivors ask me what exercises worked in my rehab. They are hoping that if they can just find the right exercise to do they will recover.

Both of these questions are invalid because the first thing to understand is how recovery occurs and where you are in the process. Until you know that can you select a therapy or exercise to work on. If you are working on penumbra recovery in the first 6-12 months then you take the little pieces of movement you do have and keep extending them longer and farther. If you are trying to get back functions that were in the dead brain area then you need to work on neuroplastic therapies that move those functions; try passive movement, mental imagery, thermal stimulation.

Until we get the whole concept of what needs to be done to recover changed from this specific therapy or exercise will we finally come up with a therapy model for stroke rehab. So don't enable the doctors and therapists by accepting a therapy or exercise without them specifying how it meets the protocol of recovery. See my blog on restructure stroke rehab model at

http://oc1dean.blogspot.com/2010/11/restructure-stroke-rehab-model.html and theoretical basis of stroke rehab for my ideas at

http://oc1dean.blogspot.com/2010/11/theoretical-basis-of-stroke-rehab.html. I actually think they are pretty good.