INTENSIVE BRAIN REHABILITATION: THE NEURO RESCUE PROGRAM
Our intensive neurological rehabilitation program, NeuroRescue is based on the premise that the brain can change and adapt in both structure and function with the correct stimulus.
A traditional neurological examination seeks to uncover areas of the nervous system that are not functioning from strokes, tumors, injuries, and other pathological processes. NeuroRescue recognizes the damaged tissue, but also assesses the level of function in the tissue that remains.
NeuroRescue takes the nerve cells that are still functional, carefully stimulates and exercises them with unique and innovative interventions, and makes them function better. This improves your ability to function in the world, and gives you an opportunity to reclaim your health and your life.
How our brain rehab treatments work:
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Our care is non-invasive, and does not require the use of medication or surgery. It is not painful or unpleasant in any way. It is extremely precise and specific. Our therapies are unique to your own nervous system and condition. Our treatment is intensive and immersive, which allows us to accelerate your recovery. It is objective, and provides measurable, quantifiable results. We empower you with the knowledge, skills, and tools to maintain your gains and continue to grow at the end of our program.
NeuroRescue starts with a comprehensive clinical examination, cutting-edge neurodiagnostic tools, and laboratory testing to identify neurological pathways and networks that are not functioning well, or functioning well together. We determine the metabolic and environmental factors that are preventing you from getting better with traditional therapies. We design a customized rehabilitation program that is unique to your brain and condition. We use a multisensory approach, integrate this with visual, vestibular, and motor exercises, along with specific cognitive exercises. We restore neurological function and endurance, and improve your ability to function in the world. This is what helps set us apart from other forms of treatment - a holistic and specific approach.
What are the treatment options?
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Our standard outpatient protocol is built by scheduling a month of care which includes seeing you in the clinic three times a week for that month. Once that concludes, we will then repeat diagnostic testing to see what’s changed, what’s improving, and what we need to continue to work on. The reassessment will then allow us to tweak the protocol and adjust your rehab accordingly. Usually, we find people reporting improvement (personally and with our testing results) within one to two months of this process.
Our other model is the NeuroRescue model. That is where we take two months worth of care, and compress it into a week. That may sound overwhelming, but it is well structured and built with your best results in mind.
NeuroRescue protocols are typically structured to allow treatment five times a day for five consecutive days. You arrive at 9am and leave by 5pm. In each of these treatment sessions, we will work with you doing our rehab protocol for about an hour and then allow you 45 minutes of rest. We then will repeat the process through the rest of the day until you are completed with your day's protocol where we send you home to rest for the night.
Diagnostic testing is then repeated on day 3 of the NeuroRescue protocol. We do this to see how you are progressing and responding to treatment, and then tweak the protocol as needed. We continue with the new protocol for the final 2 days of the NeuroRescue program and then we will run testing once more on the final day of treatment to assess your beginning of week to end of week progress. This also will allow us to see what you may need for follow up care and home exercises. We typically see NeuroRescue protocol weeks improve patients by approximately 70% within that week, while many report improvement higher in the 90-100% range.
Why does the NeuroRescue structure have such a high response?
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NeuroRescue Therapy is much like endurance training. You don’t build endurance with heavy weights and few reps. You do it with light weights and tons of reps over time. When using a NeuroRestoration approach, the focus is to generate plasticity (which is neural endurance, efficiency, connectivity, and metabolic capacity). For example, say that you have a pathway that is firing too low. Clearly, to help you feel better we will want that pathway firing back up at a proper level. We can do that if we give you the best possible exercise, at exactly the correct frequency and intensity, over the right duration of time. This should allow the pathway to begin firing back up where it belongs!
Once we get that pathway firing appropriately again, you’ll be functioning great…for about 2 hours that is. Why? Because a single session of exercises doesn’t really change the pathway. In reality we just sensitized receptors that made it fire better for a little while. If that’s all we do, we are just an expensive neurological party trick. In order to make real change, all the research in plasticity says to stimulate the pathway again before the receptor potential fully degrades, and then again, and then again. Much like lifting weights, the low intensity and high reputation will allow you to turn on all the genetic signals that say “we need more protein to get some endurance, let’s make more stuff and get efficient again.” Thus, creating more endurance at a faster rate.
That’s the whole point of doing the NeuroRescue Program! It allows us to maximize the plastic changes your brain needs to make to get better. Our results using this model are most often better than our out-patient treatment response all because of that frequency of stimulus factor. We can usually get a better change in a week than we could in two months worth of out-patient care.
Why does NeuroRescue have better results in a shorter time frame?
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There are many other factors that benefit the NeuroRescue Program. One of which is being assigned to the same rehab technician for your entire week. Why does this benefit you? Because when you work with one person several times per day, they are able to pick out and define exactly how far they can push you and exactly when to stop. All of our rehab technicians are fully trained and cross trained in all the neurorehab protocols and are specifically hired for this role due to their incredible attention to detail and ability to notice neuro fatigue points that are not incredibly obvious to the naked eye.
When someone is being treated with out-patient care, they will still need the same frequency of stimulus to get better, otherwise it’s a bit of a wheel spinner. So we set you up with home exercises to stimulate your system, and they need to perform at least three times per day. However, this is on their own and without our technicians observing and instructing the exercises. Since you can’t usually see where your own fatigue threshold is, we need to be conservative with the home exercises. We wouldn’t let you push as hard as we would push you in clinic, because you can’t see where the point is that you start to make yourself feel worse or damage pathways. Due to the exercises being more gentle and less direct, recovery is possible but usually takes longer to achieve.
So which model do I choose?
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Many patients choose to do out-patient protocols because they are unable to get 5 days off of work in a row. This is entirely understandable and our team is ready and willing to work around your schedule. However, for those who can find a way to utilize our NeuroRescue model, we encourage it because of the reduced recovery time. The less time it takes to recover is the less time you are living with your symptoms and discomfort! We want all of our patients leaving our clinic feeling supported, understood, and incredible following their treatment program completion. We look forward to designing your specialized program and helping you begin your road to recovery today.