Fracture surgery corrects the structural damage. During the surgery, the bone is plated, nailed, or pinned back into alignment, and the surgeon’s work, in most cases, is done. What the surgery cannot do is restore the function the fracture has taken. Muscle strength lost to pain and immobility, joint mobility sacrificed during fixation, the proprioceptive […]

A spinal cord injury reorders everything in hours and sometimes even in minutes. The person who arrived at the emergency department with full movement and sensation may leave the acute ward weeks later with a fundamentally different relationship to their body, their independence and their sense of what the future holds. What rehabilitation can achieve

Balance and coordination difficulties are among the most functionally limiting symptoms of any neurological injury. They are also among the most underestimated things to be considered by families. A patient who appears to be making physical progress may still be at a higher fall risk that will cause harm over time or avoiding activity in

Neuro rehabilitation is a term that appears on discharge summaries, in specialist referrals, and increasingly in conversations between families trying to understand what comes next after a stroke, brain injury, or spinal cord condition. It is also, despite its growing presence in clinical language, widely misunderstood – confused with general physiotherapy, assumed to be the

When the words “palliative care” come up, something shifts in the room. Families grow quiet, anxious, or visibly distressed. The assumption, almost universally, is that treatment is ending and hope is being withdrawn. It is one of the most common and consequential misunderstandings in serious illness care. Palliative care is not the withdrawal of treatment.

In the days following a stroke, most families find themselves focused on the complications they can see (patient unable to lift their hand, words that are tangled or patient not able to speak at all, a face that has lost its symmetry) while a quieter and often more dangerous problem develops without announcement: difficulty swallowing,

A 68-year-old man in Kochi had a knee replacement – a planned procedure, well-executed, with no complications in theatre. Three days later, he was home. The family was relieved. Everyone agreed he was doing well enough to leave. Six days after that, he was back in the hospital. A wound infection, a high fever, and

Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative (neurological) disorder, which in due course is marked by movement, balance, coordination, as well as cognitive disorders. Even though medications play a significant role in symptom management, they are not the sole element of the care process. There is also a need to formulate rehabilitation (physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and

We’ll be repeating the same thing over and over again if we say that recovery is not complete after hospital discharge. Although families of patients are relieved to take them home and provide care, there are more chances of relapse and hospital readmissions. We have also been talking about the significant role of rehabilitation in