Dept. of Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation
What Is Rehabilitation Medicine?
Rehabilitation medicine can be defined as a field that helps those getting disabilities from various diseases and injuries develop the maximum physical, mental, and social ability and potentials under given conditions to live a life at an almost normal level or without others' help, and targets the brain and spinal cord injured patients and any other patient having difficulty in gait or daily-living movements.
What Is Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation?
The spinal cord is the central nerves along with the brain and is an important connection channel to deliver command from the cerebrum to the body. Spinal cord injuries caused by traffic accidents, falling, or various types of diseases lead to paralysis of motor and sensory functions below the injured region and cause many problems in the autonomous nervous system.
Contents of the Therapy
The department of spinal cord injury rehabilitation in the National Rehabilitation Center provides technical treatment to help the spinal cord injured patients maintain independent living to the utmost. It maintains the spinal cord injury ward in which the largest number of inpatients and outpatients with the spinal cord injury are getting therapy in Korea and develops and operates various special treatment programs for the spinal cord injured patients.
Physical Therapy
- 1 Range of motion exercise, strengthening exercise strength training - Prevents contracture, increases flexibility, and performs muscular strength improvement training.
- 2 Balance, functional motion, and positioning training - Performs therapy to improve stability at the positions of rolling, sitting up, sitting, and standing up.
- 3 Respiration training - Performs training for increase in respiratory volume and efficient respiratory training along with respiratory methods.
- 4 Wheel chair skill training, movement skill training - Introduces and trains transfer skill from a wheel chair to a bed, or to a toilet bowl, and from a floor to wheel chair, wheelchair skills under physical and environmental limitations.
- 5 Gait training - Performs gait training with aids or gait training the treadmill.
- 6Pool therapy - Performs training on walking, sitting down, and positioning underwater.
Occupational Therapy
Occupational therapy should be provided to patients with the injured spinal cord so that they can use the remaining functions to perform independent activities of daily living. Occupational therapy for patients with the injured spinal cord involves upper extremity strengthening, activity a daily living training (personal hygiene, putting on or taking off clothes, eating), wheelchair evaluation and training, electric-powered wheelchair and scooter driving training, clean intermittent catheterization training, computer utilization training (using special computer-assistant tools), transfer training (to bed, toilet bowl, electric-powered lift), evaluation and utilization training for various aids related to daily life, and proper positioning.
Specifically, we perform daily-living training for patients with the fourth cervical spine injured, manufactured a guidebook for such patients, and hold an autonomous meeting called HIGH TOP on a monthly basis.
Rehabilitative Psychological Assessment and Counseling
Social Work
Functional Electrical Stimulation
Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) is a type of treatment that uses functional electrical stimuli to generate contractions in paralyzed muscles, which in turn, enable the patients to walk and stand if they are well-trained. The National Rehabilitation Center possesses the largest numbers of this equipment and actively operate with it.