What to do with spinal cord injury? Rehabilitation training for spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injury is a functional damage to the spinal cord caused by multiple factors. General spinal cord injury often causes paralysis, and patients need to undergo rehabilitation training in a timely manner. This is a long process, and family members should have enough patience to accompany patients in their slow recovery.

1. Psychological care

Most of the patients suffer sudden external injuries during normal working conditions and are not mentally prepared. They often show anxiety and panic, worry that their lives are in danger, that they will not be able to take care of themselves in the future, and that they will have no source of income. As a result, they become pessimistic and desperate, lose their appetite, and refuse to cooperate with treatment and nursing. Therefore, we nursing staff should take the initiative to care for patients in response to these situations, understand their psychological conditions, encourage them to build confidence in overcoming the disease, explain to them the basic knowledge and simple operation methods of limb function exercises for patients with spinal cord injury, tell them that as long as they persist in exercise and treatment, they will achieve different degrees of functional recovery, and tell them that maintaining a normal diet will increase the body's resistance and prevent complications.

2. Early functional intervention

Rehabilitation should be initiated as early as possible after the patient is admitted to the hospital to prevent complications. It is very important to prevent the occurrence of joint contractures and bedsores. Patients should be allowed to perform some active activities to prevent disuse atrophy. At the same time, patients should be given a sense of participating in training rather than simply passively accepting treatment. Patients and their families should be educated early and actively cooperate with rehabilitation training.

3. Provide basic care

Most patients with spinal cord injury suffer from quadriplegia or paraplegia, and long-term bed rest is prone to three major complications. Therefore, providing good basic care and preventing the three major complications are the basis of early rehabilitation training.

4. Prevent joint contracture

Correct positioning of the trunk and limbs helps prevent joint contractures and bedsores. The shoulder joint should be in an abducted position to reduce contracture and pain in the later stage; the wrist joint is usually fixed in a functional position with a splint; the fingers should be in a slightly flexed position, and passive extension, flexion, abduction and internal rotation of the hip and knee joints should be performed 5 to 6 times a day, each time for 5 minutes. Have the patient wear anti-rotation shoes on both feet or place the ankle joint in 90° dorsiflexion to prevent ankle flexion contracture.

5. Training in activities of daily living

For quadriplegic patients with varying degrees of trunk and upper limb disorders, training in daily living activities is particularly important, including self-care activities such as eating, washing, dressing, and moving patients in bed, and gradually transitioning from bed to wheelchair, which most paraplegic patients can complete independently.

6. Hand function training

Quadriplegic patients should train hand function most of the time. Use finger flexor shortening to develop a functional myodesile grip, provide patients with exercise balls or let patients actively grasp pens to train patients' grasp and finger flexion flexibility, and use splints to maintain the joint range of motion for patients who cannot actively extend the wrist, or passively help patients extend the wrist joint.