Physiotherapy assistant

PURPOSE: Reduced ability to contract the quadriceps muscles is often found immediately following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) surgery. This can lead to muscle atrophy and decreased function. Application of neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) may be a useful adjunct intervention to ameliorate these deficits following ACL surgery. The purpose of this review was to determine whether NMES in addition to standard physical therapy is superior to standard physical therapy alone in improving quadriceps strength or physical function following ACL surgery...

BACKGROUND: Treadmill training, with or without body weight support using a harness, is used in rehabilitation and might help to improve walking after stroke. This is an update of the Cochrane review first published in 2003 and updated in 2005 and 2014. OBJECTIVES: To determine if treadmill training and body weight support, individually or in combination, improve walking ability, quality of life, activities of daily living, dependency or death, and institutionalisation or death, compared with other physiotherapy gait-training interventions after stroke...

BACKGROUND: Physiotherapy is a routine component of postoperative management following total knee arthroplasty (TKA). As the demand for surgery increases it is vital that postoperative physiotherapy interventions are effective and efficient. OBJECTIVES: Determine the most beneficial active physiotherapy interventions in acute hospital and inpatient rehabilitation for improving pain, activity, range of motion and reducing length of stay for adults who have undergone TKA...

BACKGROUND: To assess the impact of structured pelvic floor physiotherapy including repeated standardized measurements in regaining urinary continence in those men who have undergone a robotic-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RALP). METHODS: A retrospective database was created on men who had undergone a RALP while under the care of two senior urological surgeons between January 2013 and July 2016 and then took part in a formal pelvic floor rehabilitation program were included in the study...

BACKGROUND: Patients with frozen shoulder show limited shoulder mobility often accompanied by pain. Common treatment methods include physiotherapy, pain medication, administration of corticosteroids, and surgical capsulotomy. Frozen shoulder often lasts from months to years and mostly affects persons in the age group of 40 to 70 years. It severely reduces the quality of life and the ability to work. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of a mobile health (mHealth) intervention that supports patients affected by "stage two" frozen shoulder...

STUDY DESIGN: A qualitative study. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to understand expectations of persons with paraplegia in India regarding their care. SETTING: India. METHODS: This study used a qualitative methodology to have a focus group interview of persons with paraplegia in India. Focus group consisted of two to four participants with paraplegia. Adults with level T6 and below, complete injury, duration of at least 6 months post injury and those living in the community were included...

Many health systems (HS) have adopted novel models of care which have included non-medical prescription (NMP) by physiotherapists. The aim of this study was to verify in the literature the existence of this practice and its possible benefits. A literature review was carried out through search on Science Direct, PubMed, SciELO, Lilacs and Google Scholar, and in the World Confederation for Physical Therapy and Chartered Society of Physiotherapy websites. In recent decades the United Kingdom adopted the NMP for health professionals, followed by Canada...

BACKGROUND: We evaluated the effectiveness of robot-assisted motion and activity in additional to physiotherapy (PT) and occupational therapy (OT) on stroke patients with hand paralysis. METHODS: A randomized controlled trial was conducted. Thirty-two patients, 34.4% female (mean ± SD age: 68.9 ± 11.6 years), with hand paralysis after stroke participated. The experimental group received 30 minutes of passive mobilization of the hand through the robotic device Gloreha (Brescia, Italy), and the control group received an additional 30 minutes of PT and OT for 3 consecutive weeks (3 d/wk) in addition to traditional rehabilitation...

INTRODUCTION: There are very few opportunities for long-term, comprehensive postgraduate education in developing countries because of fiscal and human resource constraints. Therefore, physiotherapists have little opportunity following graduation to advance their skills through the improvement of clinical reasoning and treatment planning and application. BACKGROUND: To address the need for sustainable advanced instruction in physiotherapy within the country, a postgraduate Residency program was initiated in Nairobi, Kenya in 2012...

BACKGROUND: The purpose of health and social policies is to encourage older people more longevity, remain free of disability and experience quality of life while living in their homes. The aim of this study was to describe the characteristics of 473 patients diagnosed with motor impairment in primary care, the objectives of home-based rehabilitation and its functional impact. METHODS: This prospective observational study was conducted in the Almería Health District...

Synopsis Pain-related fear is implicated in the transition from acute to chronic low back pain and the persistence of disabling low back pain, making it a key target for physiotherapy intervention. The current understanding of pain-related fear is that it is a psychopathological problem where people who catastrophise about the meaning of pain become trapped in a vicious cycle of avoidance behaviour, pain and disability, as recognised in the Fear Avoidance Model. However there is evidence that pain-related fear can also be seen as a common sense response to deal with low back pain, for example, when one is told that their back is vulnerable, degenerating or damaged...

This paper describes the pharmacological therapies and rehabilitative interventions received by 502 patients with Muscular Dystrophies, evaluated in relation to patient's socio-demographic and clinical variables, and geographical areas. Data were collected by the MD-Socio-Demographic and Clinical Schedule (MD-SC-CS) and by the Family Problems Questionnaire (FPQ). The most part of the enrolled patients were in drug treatment. The number of the medications increased in relation to patient's age, disability degree and duration of illness and was higher among patients with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) compared with Becker (BMD) or Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophies (LGMD)...

Objective: The aim of this study was to identify the significant difficulties in access to health care services experienced by patients with physical disabilities. Method: A cross-sectional study at King Abdul Aziz Medical City, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on 235 persons with physical disability, from 1 January to 30 June 2014. Results: A total of 88% of the people with disability reported having the need for someone to accompany them. Over 52% were unsatisfied with parking, 49.8% with the waiting area, 51.3% with wheel-chair services, and nearly 45% were unsatisfied with toilet facilities for the physically disabled...

BACKGROUND: Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a rare disease that causes the progressive loss of motor abilities such as walking. Standard treatment includes physiotherapy. No trial has evaluated whether or not adding aquatic therapy (AT) to land-based therapy (LBT) exercises helps to keep muscles strong and children independent. OBJECTIVES: To assess the feasibility of recruiting boys with DMD to a randomised trial evaluating AT (primary objective) and to collect data from them; to assess how, and how well, the intervention and trial procedures work...

[Purpose] The aim of this study was to systematically investigate the effects of robot-assisted therapy on the upper extremity in acute and subacute stroke patients. [Subjects and Methods] The papers retrieved were evaluated based on the following inclusion criteria: 1) design: randomized controlled trials; 2) population: stroke patients 3) intervention: robot-assisted therapy; and 4) year of publication: May 2012 to April 2016. Databased searched were: EMBASE, PubMed and COCHRAN databases. The Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) scale was used to assess the methodological quality of the included studies...

BACKGROUND: The performance of laboratory tests to diagnose pulmonary tuberculosis is dependent on the quality of the sputum sample tested. The relative merits of sputum collection methods to improve tuberculosis diagnosis are poorly characterised. We therefore aimed to investigate the effects of sputum collection methods on tuberculosis diagnosis. METHODS: We did a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate whether non-invasive sputum collection methods in people aged at least 12 years improve the diagnostic performance of laboratory testing for pulmonary tuberculosis...

Bronchiectasis is a chronic lung disease with permanent airway dilatation, mucus retention and recurrent lower respiratory tract infections. Bronchiectasis is increasing in prevalence and has a significant morbidity and an excess mortality rate over age matched controls. It is increasingly identified during investigations into chronic cough and is evident high resolution CT scanning. There remain significant knowledge gaps in our understanding of the epidemiology, pathophysiology, prognosis and optimal treatments in bronchiectasis...

BACKGROUND: Due to different physical and biological mechanisms behind ultrasound hyperthermia and phonophoresis, the requirement for ultrasound power, frequency and control modes varies. OBJECTIVE: This paper introduces an adaptive ultrasonic physiotherapy system based on real-time surveillance over physiological characteristics of the patients, which in turn assists the individual treatment and dose limitation in auxiliary rehabilitation. METHODS: The method essentially takes advantage of distinctive characteristics of two different phases (systole and diastole) of the human cardiac cycle as a medium for modulation...

In end-stage idiopathic pulmonary artery hypertension (iPAH), centrally cannulated Novalung (Novalung GmbH, Hechingen, Germany) pumpless extracorporeal lung assist (pECLA) decompresses the pulmonary artery for bridge to transplantation. We report placing a 45-year-old man with end-stage iPAH and right heart failure on centrally cannulated pECLA for 82 days as a bridge to heart and double-lung transplantation (HLTx). To our knowledge, this is the longest reported bridge to transplantation in Canada and the first successful bridge to HLTx...

BACKGROUND: Contrary to common belief of clinicians that hemorrhagic stroke survivors have better functional prognoses than ischemic, recent studies show that ischemic survivors could experience similar or even better functional improvements. However, the influence of stroke subtype on gait and posture outcomes following an intervention blending conventional physiotherapy with robotic-assisted gait therapy is missing. OBJECTIVE: This study compared gait and posture outcome measures between ambulatory hemorrhagic patients and ischemic patients, who received a similar 4 weeks' intervention blending a conventional bottom-up physiotherapy approach and an exoskeleton top-down robotic-assisted gait training (RAGT) approach with Lokomat...