Physiotherapy Month: The stuff changes lives

Описание: It’s Physiotherapy Month and I hope I can be a living example of what proper physiotherapy for FND can do for someone’s quality of life, because currently it’s not available to most patients and that is needlessly ruining lives.

The therapy always aims for walking, even though there is known likelihood I’ll never be able to do it unaided, but throughout the process, aiming for walking means smoothing out all kinds of wrinkles. While the problems of FND and EDS compound upon each other, the benefits of walking physio and the problem solving to make it possible, build on each other, countering the effects of both conditions.

This problem-solving beyond just walking looks like:
bracing for my hypermobility
learning tools for energy management
building up fitness
strengthening programmes
identifying with precision which issues are caused by which disorder
individualised ways to do physio that cause least pain flares and energy crashes

Hopefully, it’s easy to conceptualise how every single one of these has a benefit that marries with and reaches out beyond the gym and my ability to walk or not, throughout my life as a whole. I’ll probably always live with FND and will definitely always live with EDS, so disability is always going to be a part of my life but treatments like physio improve symptoms and management and make life safer, better, and longer. Yet somehow this is not reason enough for medical and political systems to practically endorse such treatments long-term in most cases.

Physiotherapy is an incredible field and the only proven treatment for Functional Movement Disorders. I believe it should be available to everyone with the diagnosis, especially while parallel systems refuse to provide the adaptive tools needed to live with the symptoms. Patients absolutely should have access to both but they currently mostly have access to neither. At the very least, if healthcare systems are not going to provide one, they absolutely should provide the other. Do you agree?

#Disability #Paralysis #FunctionalNeurologicalDisorder #LearningToWalk #ParalysisRecovery #WheelchairLife

Video Description:
Montage video featuring dozens of clips and photographs of Cait (white-passing, non binary, millennial) throughout their journey with Functional Paralysis and relearning to walk. Throwbacks from 2019 show them at the time of their diagnosis. Throwbacks from 2022 show them at the very beginning of their therapy. Recent clips show them walking and standing, shakily but confidently, with a single crutch.