Clinicians: When it comes to stroke recovery: KISS

When it comes to stroke recovery, clinicians would do well to keep it simple.

There's two important reasons...

One. The coolest new stroke recovery stuff comes from neuroscience. And the neuroscience perspective makes things really simple. 

People hear the word neuroscience and they assume everything's going to get really complicated really fast. And while there is nuance in the brain that wins people Nobel Prizes, the global perspective neuroscience provides simplifies recovery. There is good news for people like me who spend a lot of time trying to explain stroke recovery: Some of the greatest neuroscientists in the world are really good at making the brain simple.

In other words, just as you don't need to know where the carburetor is— or even what a carburetor does— you can still drive a car. We don't need to memorize Brodmann areas, or the role of the substantia nigra, or the details of fMRI to understand how the brain works. What's much more pertinent, and much more interesting, are the global perspectives neuroscience provides. That is, if you use neuroscience not to answer "what is a carburetor", but instead to answer "where does the key go?" Where's the knob for the lights? Where's the turn signal? When it comes to the global perspective, neuroscience begins to answer simple but vital questions. Like:  

What does the brain pay attention to? What forces the brain to learn? What kinds of things can fool the brain into learning? What kinds of things—what kinds of simple things—can be used to challenge the brain in a way that's productive for relearning movement after stroke?

Two. The other reason it's simple is purely technical. Only the owner of the brain can drive changes in their brain. Because learning, including what's called motor learning after stroke, requires that the survivor understands the process, on some level at least, it has to be simple. 

Nobody likes complexity. But complexity can be even more vexing to somebody who has suffered a brain injury. Don't get me wrong, I've met plenty of survivors that are smarter than I am after their stroke. But most people have had a stroke are focused on recovery and keeping their life somewhat on track than complicated recovery options.

To review... 

It has to be simple because it is simple, and because stroke survivors generally don't do complicated.

Here's the good news: the stuff that works the best is really simple. It relies on core concepts like bilateral training, introducing rhythmicity, forcing use, repetitive practice, etc

I do a lot of talks to clinicians. And it's amazing how many people will trust a complex treatment that they really don't understand over a simple treatment that they would have understood the moment they learned how to walk. What I would counsel therapists is this: If it's too complicated for you to get it from a simple explanation, you should probably save your money and save your patient's time, because that complicated stuff usually doesn't work.