Dr David Hamilton Home Page

Mind Over Stroke
(www.drdavidhamilton.com)

There’s emerging strong evidence that the mind can speed up rehabilitation and recovery after a stroke.

A 2009 study of 35 acute poststroke patients showed this. The patients were split into two groups, one that used daily visualization of themselves moving impaired limbs as well as physiotherapy and the other group who received only standard physiotherapy.

Eighteen of the patients were in the visualization group and the 17 were in the physiotherapy group. The visualization group did mental imagery exercises every day for 3 weeks.

At the end the groups were compared in their ability to carry out tasks with the same tasks before the study began. Those in the visualization group performed much better. They showed substantial improvement in 4 out of 5 tasks whereas the physiotherapy group only made substantial improvements in 1 task.

Previous studies in the use of visualization for stroke rehabilitation (See my book, ‘How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body’) have found the same thing. It works because the brain doesn’t distinguish between real movement or imagined movement. When a person imagines moving a muscle, the same area of the brain is stimulated as if they really did move the muscle.

This sends signals out of the brain, down the spinal column to the actual muscle and stimulates the muscle. The more mental work that’s done, the stronger the muscle becomes.

Here’s a link to the scientific paper if you want to read for yourself: http://stroke.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/STROKEAHA.108.540997v1