Brain and Body Rehabilitation

Experienced therapists – consider how disabling tone is on some of your patients recovering from stroke. As noted in my June 9th blog on tone, “tone can be unwarranted, unpredictable, excessive, and uncontrollable…causing an ankle to turn in”…and, “Tone can raise in times of stress (after conflict), when a task is perceived to be either difficult (accuracy or resistance), dangerous (balance threat), confusing (distractions, complex instructions or sequence).” Now, consider our evolving role in “normalizing tone”. Gone are the days of neutral warmth, compression, rythmical or predictable movements – all transient applications without carryover to life. What has and should replace these interventions, though, to reduce tone? Therapeutic exercise? More strength = less tone? What about an habituation approach to not only introduce distractions (more tolerance to complexity, less reactivity?) as I have written about extensively…but ALSO an element of pressure training. More to follow on this concept, soon…