Chocolachillie

Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation is a fairly new and revolutionary therapy for brain-injured children and young adults.

Its founder is Leonid Blyum - a Russian mathematician - who developed this therapy together with his father, Eugene - a medical doctor.

Brain injury has profound influences on the body. Often brain injured children develop spasticity and contractures as a result of a poor structure, causing considerable pain and discomfort and minimal function. Brain injured children often also breathe incorrectly, further depriving them of developing a strong trunk - which is the way a “normal” baby would develop from birth onwards.

A braininjured person’s body is usually “deflated” - meaning that the muscle layer at the level of the organs, does not supply enough support for the bone structure and superficial muscles - resulting in deformity. Proper function is not possible with structural deformity.

Conventional therapies sees the cure to brain injury as seated in the brain - and because this is still largely impossible, they try to get the brain-injured person to use a poorly structured body to the best of his or her ability. Often, function is gained. But it is usually adapted and very limited function.

ABR is one of a number of therapies that does not attempt to address the problem at the brain level, but aim to restore proper structure first. The brain is immensely pliable and is usually able to find alternative ways of communicating with the body. This is true especially of something like CP, because CP ususally implies a diffuse injury to the brain - meaning the injury is widespread rather than concentrated in one spot and did not wipe out every braincell responsible for a particular action. Because there is two-way communication between the brain and the muscles, the brain also needs to get a correct electromechanical picture from the body. And a poor structure sends an incorrect picture to the brain, incapacitating it.

ABR aims to restore proper volume to the body at the level of the smooth muscle layer. This makes ABR unique. The technique used is very gentle and consists of pressure applied to certain parts of the body through a lens of padding. Thus energy is transferred to the targeted area without triggering spastic superficial muscles. Slowly but surely volume and strength is restored to the body, resulting in correction of aligment and spotaneous recovery of functions - following normal development.

The therapy is done by the parents and caregivers of the child and is uniquely designed for every child. In South Africa, six-montly assessments are done by a team from Belgium and new exercises worked out and taught to the parents and caregivers over a course of three days.

The ideal is to spend around three hours a day on ABR and because it is so gentle, some of it can be done while the child is asleep, watching TV or being read to. A machine has been developed that can do the more basic applications and a number of people have reported very good results with it.

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