STRUCTURAL NEUROREHABILITATION

Yes. Our programs are entirely safe, and specifically designed to help challenge your systems without promoting pain or significant fatigue.

The vast majority of your motor output involves reflex stabilization of your body. When you decide to reach out and pick up a pencil, for example, the pencil weighs next to nothing. Your arm is much heavier, and the act of reaching out causes a shift in your center of mass. This creates forces that act to pull you out of your chair, dislocate your shoulder, and tear your spine apart. 

The reason this does not happen is that your brain has an unconscious concept of where your body is in space, created by visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive inputs. Your brain determines where you are in the world, and calculates the expected shift in your center of mass. It uses this to fire stabilization reflexes milliseconds before you move, so you can perform the movement effectively and efficiently. 

If your brain receives inappropriate inputs from your eyes, your inner ear, or your muscles and joints, or if it is unable to integrate these inputs properly, your unconscious concept of where you are in space will be wrong. This leads to you firing the wrong stabilization reflexes, your muscles and joints fire inappropriately, and you predispose yourself to re-injury whenever you move.

This process need not have anything to do with muscular strength or tone; it involves inappropriate neurological control. We regularly see professional athletes with remarkable physical strength that are continuously reinjured due to poor neuromuscular control.

Once we identify deficiencies in your neuromuscular control mechanisms, we can start by rehabilitating their function and integration directly. This often involves some form of visual or vestibular rehabilitation, and may involve photobiomodulation or electrical neuromodulation strategies as well. 

Once proper control function and integration have been restored, we can begin to use similar forms of stimulation along with specific physical therapy exercises and joint manipulation therapies to begin to rebuild your structural foundation from the inside out. As you improve, we make the exercises more dynamic, more challenging, and usually, more fun.

No. Our therapies are designed to be painless and do not provoke any significant fatigue. It is important to understand that with traditional structural rehabilitation, the goal is to push muscles to the point of fatigue and failure, so they can develop microscopic tears to the tissue that promotes protein formation and increases strength. The opposite is true in neurological rehabilitation. If you push a neurological pathway to the point of failure and continue to fire it, this engages a neurometabolic cascade that can damage neurons in the pathway and decrease overall function. We are very careful to ensure that we do not push any neurological system past the point of fatigue.

Traditional physical therapy is commonly employed to address the structural damage associated with neurological insults like concussions and traumatic brain injuries. This can be very useful in helping patients reduce pain, headaches, muscle spasms, and heal their tissue damage. In cases where a patient injures a joint or muscle where there is no neurological injury or central neurological disorder, such therapy is perfectly appropriate. But when the brain is injured, often the structural problems seen on physical examination are consequences of the brain injury, rather than associated structural problems. Successful treatment requires the ability to determine whether this is the case and create treatment protocols that address both the structural and neurological issues at the same time. 

As an example, if you damage central neurological pathways that move the eyes to the left, the eyes will deviate to the right. These pathways can be from the frontal lobe, the cerebellum, the brainstem, the vestibular system, and several other structures, either alone or in combination. When your eyes are deviated to the right, the brain will engage a reflex that turns your head to the left in order to see straight ahead. It does this by contracting muscles at the base of your skull. These can become chronically tight and painful, and often promote headaches. 

Your brain doesn’t care if doing this creates headaches, it just wants to make sure that you can see where the world is so you can engage with it properly. A therapist may determine that the tight muscles are the source of your headaches, and use a number of techniques, modalities and exercises to reduce the muscle tension. This may help the headaches and neck pain. Unfortunately, the brain needs this muscle tone to compensate for the impaired visual reflexes, and the therapy takes the compensation away. This may reduce the headache, but it will usually come back shortly after treatment. More importantly, taking the compensation away makes it harder for the brain to determine where it is in space, and it thus takes longer for the brain to heal and stabilize. 

Our solutions involve determining the exact regions of the brain that are creating the impaired reflex compensations, and designing specific programs to rehabilitate these before engaging in structural therapies. In this way we can greatly shorten the time necessary for your system to heal. We address the root cause to get you better faster, with less effort and fewer symptoms along the way.