For all of those stroke patients who have not yet tried water therapy, I wanted to share another study with you that shows how it outperforms land stroke recovery therapy.
Recently, some researchers asked themselves the very question we constantly answer here at Strokes4Strokes: does water therapy provide effective recovery? Resoundingly, they were able to answer an enthusiastic "Yes!". Also, the research they did shows that in many cases, water recovery is superior to land stroke recovery. Now, that just makes me feel pretty good.
Let me count the ways that water recovery is actually more supportive of stroke recovery. Water therapy is superior to land therapy for balance, walking, muscular strength, body self positioning awareness (the technical term, if you care to know, is proprioception), quality of life, physiological indicators (such as heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature) and cardiorespiratory fitness. Wow, that's an impressive list. In fact, land based stroke therapy only tied water-based stroke therapy in progressing towards independence daily activities. I guess that's ok, after all, unless you are on swim team, I guess most people do spend most of the day out of the pool . . .
To me, it was even more interesting to see that the water based recovery was the most effective when it was tied to established water-based therapies, such as the Halliwick Method or the Bad Ringaz Ring therapy. Notably, aquatic treadmill walking was deemed to be the least effective water based therapy. Ok folks, let's keep the treadmills on the land then . . .