I felt very bad to see that stroke patients around the world were struggling to restore the lost sensory motor control. I wondered how I would feel if I was in the shoes of the patient and the patient was on the other side of the table! Certainly, I would not accept the loss and a life of dependence despite spending so much TIME, ENERGY, MONEY all these COST for rehabilitation that is not productive in true sense.
Family, society and state all loses productive time period of the stroke subject. It was not difficult to see and feel frustration among the patients, their family, the medical fraternity consisting of the therapists and the doctors, the insurance companies and the Government.
I began to make introspection to find that I only new some techniques and I delivered them to the stroke subjects without much results because these techniques did not solve the root cause nor did I know what was the root cause of all these complex problems. IÂ began to take interest in experimental evidence in motor control and what I recognized was that questions of typical stroke motor behavior frequently became the source of more questions than answers and after a century of extensive multidisciplinary research, attempt to capture the complexity of purposive action and adaptive behavior remained far from over.
The inability of the accepted approach to deal with the subject made me take unchartered path to experiment clinically on the chronic stroke subject in the clinical atmosphere to find answers to series of unanswered questions with number of highly willing patients who had stroke for more than 6 months to 10 years and wanted to recover completely and were not willing to accept dependant life, were fed up of sensory loss, Paraesthesia, spasticity, abnormal synergic grouping in UL with wrist finger contracture and elbow flexion contracture with reaching out difficulties. Depression became common crisis in stroke subjects because of being dependant and from difficulties in walking and climbing the stairs hurting self image and antidepressant did not do any good to them to improve self image or get independent and self reliant.
I began to think with âout of the boxâ ideas. I convinced the patients not to work on the negative and positive symptoms of the muscle. I convinced the patients that weakness and spasticity in muscle strongly indicates that muscle is simply a victim of CNS lesion. I suggested patients not to focus on individual units of the body like UL in occupational therapy and LL and gait training in physiotherapy and speech with speech therapy but to begin to handle the entire body as one whole integrated unit by focusing on postural control instead of individual voluntary control on the segments because âwhole is bigger than sum total of its parts for a living biological systemâ and by focusing on individual parts there is a danger of making a division in the mind about paretic side and non paretic side and this division in the mind makes it difficult for the paretic body to work in normal integration with non paretic body.
I made the stroke subject realize that brain is a dynamic self organizing non linear structure that does not wait for anybody when in danger and self organizes to prioritize safety of COM always a priority for any living biological system. I made them use the same paretic body as a window to the brain and taught to exploit paretic body coupled with external environment to channalize the brain. I made the patients aware that their own brain is the best tool easily available with infinite power to help it to re-reorganize it over any man made machine.
The above journey into the unchartered water took shape of Vasa Concept which in essence channelizes and directs the dialogue between brain, body and external environment by reconfiguring entire musculo skeletal system to manipulate afferent inflow so as to re-reorganize the stroke brain to achieve desirable motor outflow that helps expand boundaries of COM movement in all Cartesian coordinates on the paretic side of the central axis and restore lost sensory motor control without external commands only by inducing change from within that also helps to restore communicative, perceptual and cognitive abilities as a byproduct.
Vasa Concept works on the human being as a whole in specially designed postures that gives the patient confidence of being in control of the self to help the self and not waste time on palliative treatment but restore the lost control that helps restore him back with the family, society, country with his productive life.