Thursday, August 28, 2008
Communication and head injuries
A patient of mine suffered a head injury recently. As a result, he has developed severe dyspraxia, and only as the ability to understand one stage commands. During treatment, it makes it hard to get him to understand concepts such as pelvic tilt and lateral tilt, correction of which involves commands which even a person of normal cognition can find difficult. After many attempts at trying to simplify my instructions with not much success, I decided do a more hands-on and less talk approach, with telling the pt to "move with me" and not say much more than that other than giving cues such as "straighten up" and "grow long". I found that this approach worked a lot better than giving mainly verbal cues (even though I was trying to make my initial instructions a lot more concise). Therefore I found my treatment a lot more effective, and saved me the effort from talking more than I needed.
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2 comments:
I agree i have had to treat patients who cannot understand instructions unless they are very simple and sometimes it is easier to use a more hands on approach then to try and simplify instructions. In these situations verbal cues are the least important and hands on can be much more effective.
I also had a similar experience and sometimes found that talking confused them more and that facilitation and demonstration gave the best results
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