We bought a Concept II rower back in the late 1990s, the same one athletes use for training. We both used it. Me with my blood pressure that had a tendency to drop under stress from lack of catecholamines, couldn’t do much in comparison to fit and tall him. But I was progressing up levels.…
Category: Treatment
Treatment of brain injury that aims to heal neurons and restore functionality, cognitive skills, emotions, heart and temperature regulation, etc.
Reading Chapter x Chapter x Chapter
Lindamood-Bell’s visualizing and verbalizing program to restore reading comprehension starts with an image, a sentence, and builds up to a chapter and then finally chapter by chapter, just like normal reading. You visualize as you read; at the end, you verbalize. It’s a lot more difficult to visualize several chapters in a row then verbalize…
Life Before the Internet
Do you remember life before the internet? I do remember life before the internet, but I was an early adopter, so that was a loooong time ago. I used my father’s University of Toronto email account to email an American friend until torfree.net came on the scene. Then someone, I forget who, got in touch…
Broken A Bone, Broken A Brain
Have you ever broken a bone? Perhaps my broken bone foresighted my broken brain. Not the break itself but the response to it. A child. Springtime. Judo after school. Went up the belts rapidly. Orange belt. After school play with friends. Energetic. In dresses and tights. No thought of breaking anything in myself. But then,…
AVE For Energy: Lifting Brain Injury’s Suffocating Fatigue
I’ve been using SMR/Beta audiovisual entrainment (AVE) session most mornings for a very long time. Clinical experience and research showed this session has a paradoxical relaxation effect on people with brain injury, not just boosting my brain function. And years ago, with my original DAVID Delight device, I discovered beta 18Hz sparked my thinking back…
Learning Is Forever
Describe a decision you made in the past that helped you learn or grow. As I read this prompt, I immediately thought of the day I decided to call the ADD Centre and said “yes” to attending there for their expensive assessment and treatment program. Their program was outside any kind of medicine that I…
Watch to SmartWatch
I wore a watch since my 8th birthday until a few years after my brain injury when my skin and tolerance to skin irritation made me take it off. I figured I’d use TTC clocks (OK, hard to see after they upgraded to those screens), city clocks (where are they‽), or my Palm, later my…
Why Should Health Care Professionals Use Neurostimulation?
Why are neurostimulation techniques not adopted widely, given how effective they are? I believe it comes down to trust, anxiety, and being overburdened. I want to talk today about why it’s important for health care professionals of all kinds to learn about and use audiovisual entrainment (AVE) and cranioelectrical stimulation (CES) in their practices. I…
Is Mental Work the Same as Exercise?
Increasing mental work while not decreasing physical exercise commensurately was a really bad idea after brain injury. This lesson no one taught me. NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—is a month of writing every single day in November to create a 50,000-word novel. This writing community and event includes anyone, no matter your ability; it releases your…