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Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation concerns the psychophysical restoration of people who have sustained severe injuries and/or have acute, chronic, or progressive disorders and diseases, and promotes the maintenance/exten-sion of their functional abilities.

Rehabilitation professionals treat and manage patients’ disabilities and also address the social limitations that may result from their pathophysiology, with the aim of enabling them to return to the activities of a normal life.

Indeed, rehabilitation professionals take into account physical, psychosocial, cultural, and environmental factors, choosing and utilizing appropriate intervention strategies within a holistic approach.

To start a formal rehabilitation program, a medical doctor writes a referral to a rehabilitation professional/team, describing the type of illness/injury and its date of onset, and sets therapy's long-term overall goals.

Then, the rehabilitation professional/team settles, for each of the patient's problems, specific short-term goals, helps the patient to achieve them and carefully monitors the patient's progress.

The goals of rehabilitation can differ, depending on factors such as type of impairment and age of the patient: people with chronic impairments, often older people, may need a less intensive but probably longer rehabilitation program than younger people, and require different kinds of therapy than younger people do.

For instance, the goal of an older patient who has had a stroke may be to renew his or her ability to accomplish as many self-care activities as possible: eating, controlling bladder and bowel, using the toilet, moving from bed to a chair, dressing, and bathing. The goal of a younger patient who has been involved in a car accident is often to restore his or her full functionality.

Treatable Conditions

As rehabilitation concerns the holistic concept of global health and is based on the fundamental unity of mind– body system, rehabilitation techniques, which are focused on the body, also have effects on the rehabilitation of the mind. Vice versa, all the injuries/diseases/disabili-ties/syndromes that affect the body (e.g., musculoskeletal disorders), also have an influence on mind and mood.

Therefore, many rehabilitation techniques, whose target is to improve physical health, can also enhance the psychosocial and cognitive status; in turn, many rehabilitation techniques that are aimed to improve the psychosocial and cognitive status can also enhance physical health.

Indeed, rehabilitation centers/professionals usually do not use a single rehabilitation technique in an exclusive way, but carry out (with the patient's agreement) a rehabilitation program that includes a group of techniques, which can be used at the same time or in a sequence; in this way, results, achieved using a certain technique, encourage the acquisition of specific capabilities, which in turn, foster the acquisition of other capabilities, setting up the prerequisites for the use of other techniques. The various rehabilitation techniques can be applied to people affected by blindness, hearing loss, diseases/disorders/injuries of the musculoskeletal apparatus (among them hip, shoulder, and wrist injuries/disorders, limb fractures, arm and leg amputations, muscular dystrophy, etc.), diseases/disor-ders of the cardiovascular and pulmonary apparatus, neurologic diseases/injuries (such as brain and spinal injuries, which can cause problems in muscular control), neuropsychological, and psychiatric disorders/diseases (such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, etc.).

By means of various types of therapeutic exercises (which are intended to enhance a range of motion, muscle tone and strength, coordination, balance, and ambulation), physical therapy prevents muscle atrophy and improves functional independence as well as physical performance.

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