Recovery process after brain injury
Written by:Brain lesions affect patients who have suffered an acquired brain injury, stroke and mostly head injuries, but also caused by cerebral anoxia, tumors or other pathologies.
Avoiding death is the great achievement of modern medicine. The enormous scientific advances of the last years, the assistance means and the titanic effort to save life in the Intensive Care Units, in the Neurology or Neurosurgery Services, have led to a greater survival. We survive more, but at the expense of a disability .
Once the acute phase of the disease has been overcome, the patient should undergo a neurorehabilitation treatment. There are monographic centers dedicated to this, treating the person who has suffered the consequences of brain damage as a whole indivisible by the different specialists that make up the neurorehabilitation team (neurologist, rehabilitator, psychiatrist, physiotherapists, neuropsychologists, speech therapists, occupational therapists , ...). The goal is to minimize the consequences and achieve the greatest possible autonomy. And is that brain damage can affect all spheres of life, can produce deficiencies at the motor, cognitive or affective-behavioral level. Our experience allows us to affirm that a precocious, intensive, coordinated and interdisciplinary treatment improves the long-term prognosis, reducing the severity of the sequelae and disability.
The nervous system has an adaptive capacity to change its structure and functioning. This cerebral plasticity allows us to act on neural networks, since everything is connected, and improve the different functions. But this capacity is temporary, hence the importance of starting as soon as possible. In addition to specific therapies with professionals there are other techniques such as Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation , a non-invasive technique that involves the application of pulses of electromagnetic energy on the nerve cells of the brain to activate or modify their functioning, or the Stimulation Equipment Bioelectric for the rehabilitation of the paralyzed hand.