Greetings…I wonder can anyone share their experiences of how yoga could help a stroke victims??
[QUOTE=Bewithyou;38173]Thanks for sharing this. It is also helpful for me.[/QUOTE]
Are you a troll? You’ve added this response to a whole bunch of posts yet for this particular post it makes no sense so makes me wonder what your intentions are.
Namaste Galiane Ocean,
Dealing with stroke victims is difficult and not easy and you need to be extremely gentle with such a person. You volunteer very little information, so I’ll speak in general and from the assumption you are a teacher and have such a person in your class.
First of all what makes a stroke difficult is that there are different strokes and each stroke affects the individual in a different way. Two of my friends had strokes and each one was affected differently. It is important to assess the individual on his/her individual post stroke symptoms. My one friend was totally paralysed on his left in the face down to the fingers. My other friend had no physical paralysis, but she couldn’t speak and she got extremely dizzy when she made the slightest movements. So initially it was virtually impossible to do any asanas with her, even lying down made her dizzy. Point is you need to go extremely slow with these patients. You need to modify most of their asanas and you need to assist them constantly, so they can’t join a general class initailly, but need to be helped individually.
One precaution I can give is to assume that your student had carotid plaque build up and that during the stroke pieces of this plaque may have broken off and are heading perhaps for the brain. It is important to modify twists in such a way that they don’t twist their necks when doing a spinal twist, but that they use the chest and belly to engage the twist. If your patient tells you differently and it was confirmed by the attending doctor, then you may proceed as normal.
Stroke victims tire very quickly in the beginning, they have very little strength in the beginning. Take all of this into consideration and take great care to help them to restore their strength and confidence. Therefore select easy asanas initially which you know that will master easily in order to build their confidence and sense of achievement and that all is not lost.
The one aspect that you first need to give attention to, even before you start with any asanas is the emotional aspect of such a person. They are usually filled with grief at their lost ability, fear of the future and will they heal completely and this is followed by anxiety, you can just image, their bodies went through a massive shock, so you need to be gentle with them. I start both my friends off with only doing simple pranayamas in the beginning for the first two weeks or so just to ground them again and to calm them down to the point where I could start working on a physical level with them. Both make a full recoery, my friend who had the paralysis has a slight hanging of the muscles on the left of his mouth. My other freind had a fully recovery.
There is a wonderful book that I can recommend: [I]Recovery Yoga: A Practical Guide for Chronically Ill, Injured, and Post-Operative People[/I] (Random House, 1997), by Sam Dworkis.
Then I would like to refer you to this post by the original creator of this Forum, Mukanda Stiles. Please read his post #4 as that pertains perhaps to my reply and may give you more insight and guidance as well: http://www.yogaforums.com/forums/f18/yoga-and-stroke-604.html