I'm so sorry I haven't posted anything recently I've just been extremely busy with Arjan
The last two weeks have been crazy. But brace yourself I shall explain all!!!
Like most parents we are always looking for new treatments that will actually help Arjan with his development and especially with the CP. We came across ABR (Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation ) nearly a year ago but we never thought to be something that would actually benefit Arjan as we were under the impression that Arjan could do a lot more than the children shown on the website.
ABR (in layman's terms) is a treatment where you are actually trying to make them muscle structure of the body stronger rather than having a physiotherapy view on it. It contains a series of "exercises " that are used to build the muscle strength for each individual. So say for instance Arjan has quadriplegic cerebral palsy- so not only are his limbs week but he's also is extremely weak. I will first focus point would-be his torso and getting that strong. Now for the last year also I've noticed that as Arjan started rolling the focus on building his torso and making that stronger was decreasing. And more and more focus was put onto him doing four point kneeling or sitting. Even though all these exercises were good however we still weren't building up his torso which became more apparent when we were told by his hips were starting to come out. As soon as we were told that he might need surgery on his hip that's when we decided we need to look at some other sort of treatment for him to avoid surgery. This is where ABR came in.
ABR approach is a nonsurgical ,non-physiotherapy view. It works on reducing the spasticity in the muscles and the increased muscle tone and hopefully eliminating any muscular pain that your child may suffer. You are given a number of different equipment for each different exercise. I don't think that these exercises just plucked from the air what they do is they do a 2 to 3 hour assessment on your child looking at them from head to toe and seeing what their problem areas are and take it from there.
Now as mentioned before we thought Arjan was doing a lot more and probably was a lot stronger than the children on the website however we were very very shocked to realise how weak are arjan's muscles really are!
We were shown a series of pictures of Arjan that they took during the Assesment of him sitting ,lying, how he's moving his head,how he actually was rolling and it was shocking to see how stiff his body really gets when he's trying to do something-it really did open our eyes
What does it involve?
Keep it simple it's like doing compressions on your Childs body to wake up and strengthen the muscles. Now when we first saw what we have to do we just go to ourselves this is it going to work however looking at all the case studies on the website you can't help but think surely this must have some positive impact on all these children. Some of the case studies are of children that are extremely stiff but after a year or so of doing ABR they are now sitting unaided and sitting beautifully straight
They ask you to commit to at least three hours a day of doing these exercises but don't be alarmed you don't have to do all three hours at the same time. You can break the exercises up during the day however if you are given one exercise to do for half an hour you've got to do that one excited for half an hour you can't break and exercise up into segments
I think the assessors thought that we were very hands-on sort of parents so instead of giving us the 3 hours worth of exercises they gave us extra however now walking away from the assessment you just don't appreciate how difficult it is to do these exercises and how time-consuming they really are
We are only in week 1 so we're almost like weaning Arjan onto the exercises however I will keep you all posted in regards to his progress and how I'm finding it
If you'd like to find out more about ABR I will just at the link below
www.abracotland.com
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