Two Minute Tuesdays (all about intensive therapy).

Function is all about what people do! This can be a task, role, job or play for children (or even big kids!). How we do it isn’t as important because people can do things differently and that is entirely ok. What is important is enabling and facilitating a task, role or job to be completed.

For Tayla, she outlined two main functions that she sees as important. Transfers and walking are valued for Tayla because it is what keeps her independent when she is out and about in the community. She recognises that muscle tone really impacts her and can be a barrier for her to participate in transfers and walking. So for therapists working with Tayla, we can really focus on improving these skills - break down the task and support her with achieving them. The role of botulinum toxin (Botox ® ) can support her with managing her tone and therefore therapy timed just after these injections is ideal to support the development of these skills. 

We also know that evidence shows that activity based therapies is the best way forward in achieving these goals. In NDIS terms, it represents value for money because we know that activity based therapies give Tayla the best care and opportunity to achieve these goals. So what does activity based therapy look like? Well it is all about as much hands off as possible so that Tayla can generate the movements herself. 

Traditional forms of therapy or a lot of the therapies unproven by research have a lot of commonalities in that they focus a lot on the handling skills of the therapist i.e. how a therapist can manipulate the body to get a reaction. Essentially this means that there is a dependence on how a body is manipulated in order to get the desired reaction. 

Generating new pathways needs active self initiated movement from the person in an environment that best reflects everyday. This is supported by the current research so when we say that therapies are evidence based - this is what we mean! How it is done is individual and it is important that we remember everyone does things differently!