Balance Master

Falls cause more than 95 percent of hip fractures. Even if you're not injured, falling is frightening. We want to help you feel capable and confident in your movement. Lake Regional's therapists use the latest technology, The Balance Master^© System, in a safe, controlled setting, to assess balance and mobility skills of seniors and others referred to the program. This information allows our staff to screen for fall risk and design a training program customized to meet individual needs.

Individuals interested in participating in Lake Regional's program must have their physician's referral. Medicare and most major insurance plans cover assessments and training exercises. For more information, call Lake Regional Physical Therapy at 573.302.2230.

Balance and Vestibular System Disorders

Dizziness, unsteadiness and falling. Our specialized training in treating all types of balance and vestibular system disorders includes:

• Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV)
• Concussion
• Labyrinthitis
• Vestibular neuritis
• Migraine-related dizziness and vertigo
• Balance and difficulty walking
• Postural control

Types of Treatment

Balance and vestibular disorders cause many people to limit their activities and can significantly affect your quality of life. We use the most up-to-date technologies and proven therapies to assess your condition and get you back on your feet. This includes:

• Manual repositioning
• Desensitization
• Gaze stabilization
• Posturography assessment and treatment

Contact us to discuss your challenges and learn more about how therapy can help you.

Because we use our hands for so many tasks, hand pain can negatively affect nearly every aspect of our daily lives. If you suffer from an injury, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome or other painful conditions of the hand, wrist or elbow, our therapists can help reduce your pain and get you back to doing those things you need and want to do. Our therapists design each treatment based on the referring doctor's diagnosis and the specific needs of each patient.

Conditions We Treat

• Pain
• Finger and wrist fractures
• Carpal tunnel syndrome
• Tendinitis
• Crush injuries
• Repetitive motion disorders

Neurological disorders can severely inhibitt your quality of life. Disease or injury to the nervous system can cause problems with walking, grasping objects, balance, vision or hearing. In severe cases, patients may experience pain, tremors and even paralysis. Neuromuscular disorders affect the nerves that control voluntary muscles. When these nerves are disrupted, it becomes difficult or impossible to control movement in affected areas, such as arms and legs.

Physical therapy for neurological disorders leads to increased strength and greater levels of functioning. At RehabVisions, we listen to you, evaluate your needs and create a comprehensive plan to help you feel and function better.

RehabVisions at Harbor Regioanal Health physical therapists help neurological patients by teaching them exercises that maintain muscle mass, improve walking skills, joint function and reduce muscle spasms. We focus on helping you achieve maximum recovery and improve your quality of life using the most current technologies and evidence-based treatment methods.

Our physical, occupational and speech therapists are skilled in treating a variety of neurological disorders, including:

• Stroke
• Head injury
• Muscular dystrophy
• Parkinson's disease
• Multiple sclerosis
• Cerebral palsy
• ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease)
• Developmental delays and disorders

RehabVisions therapists are skilled in sports therapy and treating all orthopedic conditions, including:

• Sports injuries, strains and sprains
• Fractures
• Joint surgeries
• Tendon repair
• Amputations
• Arthritis

Treatment Options

We use the latest technologies and evidence-based treatment methods, including:

• Astym^®
• High-velocity/low-amplitude manipulation
• Joint mobilizations
• Strain/counter-strain
• Myofascial release

Contact RehabVisions to discuss your challenges and learn more about how therapy could help you reach your goals.

Pain can be frustrating and debilitating. At RehabVisons, our physical therapists have extensive training in pain relief to ease your suffering and improve your quality of life.

Conditions We Treat

• Back pain
• Neck pain
• Muscle and joint pain
• Sciatica
• TMJ (temporomandibular joint) pain

Treatment Options

We use the latest treatments and therapies to help you feel and function like yourself again, including:

• Strain/counter-strain
• Therapeutic modalities
• Manual therapy
• Patient education

We want to improve your quality of life. Contact RehabVisions at Harbor Regional Health to discuss your challenges and learn more about how therapy could help you reach your goals.

We offer specialized pediatric physical therapy services to help children and their families enjoy the highest quality of life. We see children for physical therapy for a wide variety of diagnoses, including cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism, developmental delays, brain or spinal cord injuries, and genetic disorders.

Our certified therapists work one-on-one with children to improve motor coordination, muscle tone, range of motion, posture and more. All of these skills are critical to our patients' future independence and quality of life.

We offer water therapy, bodyweight-supported treadmill training, speech therapy and a variety of fun strengthening activities. Our home education program will give you the confidence to guide your child to achieve goals.

Download our Developmental Benchmarks Chart.

Injury, nutrition and aging are just a few of the many things that can cause weakness. And weakness can be a downward spiral. As we get weaker, we tend to do less; as we do less, we become even weaker.

RehabVisions at Harbor Regional Health can help you stop this cycle, regain your strength and get you moving again. Our physical and occupational therapists can guide you in strengthening and balancing exercises. We help older adults safely regain their strength and their walking stride with the Biodex Unweighing System, a device that enables partial weight-bearing therapy. Once supported, the patient can perform gait and balance exercises.

If an injury at work has impeded your performance in the workplace, our work injury rehabilitation program provides an aggressive yet cautious approach to getting you back to work quickly and at an optimal performance level.

Your personal physical therapy begins with a comprehensive evaluation of functional limitations and areas of pain. Our team of expert physical therapists will design a treatment plan based on your work-related needs and goals. This includes real or simulated work activities specific to your job, such as lifting, climbing or keyboarding. We take a team approach and will consult with your employer and case manager, if necessary.

Throughout your treatment, we will work hard to help you return to all normal functional activities. When you are ready for discharge, you will receive a personalized home exercise program to allow you to stay healthy on the job, further enhance your rehabilitation outcome and prevent the possibility of reinjury.

Aphasia is a language impairment typically caused by injury to the left hemisphere of the brain. It affects all areas of language function, including speaking, understanding spoken speech, writing and reading. Aphasia can have many different presentations depending on which area of the left hemisphere was affected.

Some common symptoms of aphasia include:

• Difficulty retrieving the correct word, substituting a word for the needed word. Sometimes these substitutions make sense, but often they change the meaning of what is intended to be said.
• Use of words that are not real and do not make sense. A patient's language may show occasional use of strange words, or may be almost entirely nonsensical, depending on the severity of the aphasia.
• Difficulty making a point, excessive talking to make a vague point, or using a lot of words with very little resulting meaning at the end of speaking—"empty" speech.
• Difficulty understanding what is being said. Some patients may say "yes" to every question, or answer with irrelevant statements.
• Difficulty initiating speech, or near complete inability to talk.
• Effortful speech that is difficult to produce, is missing words (telegraphic speech), or has many sound errors.
• Inability or decreased ability to write.
• Impaired reading comprehension. Some patients may not recognize letters, while others may struggle with single words or short sentences.

RehabVisions' speech therapy team uses a unique, comprehensive approach to treating aphasia. Although many approaches to aphasia treatment target only a single modality (speaking, listening, reading or writing), RehabVision therapists use a treatment approach that targets all language modalities for every task of language in a sequenced hierarchy of difficulty. We are proud of all of our patients' successes in their recovery of language.

Cognitive impairment is comprised of deficits in one or more areas of cognitive functioning:

• Memory: recalling either long-term (happened in the near to far past) or short-term (happened very recently) information
• Attention: ability to attend to a single task over a sustained period of time, flex attention between tasks or pay attention to more than one task at a time
• Problem-solving: ability to solve both simple, routine daily problems (what to wear or eat for breakfast), or complex problems (pay bills, plan a vacation)
• Organization: ability to sequence thoughts to maintain progression from one task to another to accomplish a goal
• Executive function: overlying ability to coordinate all of the above cognitive areas to function independently in tasks of daily living

Cognitive impairment can be caused by a specific brain injury, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury from an accident. It also occurs as a result of degenerative brain diseases, such as dementia, Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis and others.

The speech therapy team at RehabVisions offers formal evaluation and assessment of cognitive deficits resulting from any cause. We have had success treating individuals who have cognitive deficits as a result of specific brain injury and also offer family and caregiver education for improved management and care of individuals with degenerative cognitive impairment.

Dysphagia is defined as difficulty swallowing. Difficulty swallowing can occur in the oral stage (chewing, sucking, controlling food or liquid), in the pharyngeal stage (moving food or liquid through the throat efficiently), or in the esophageal stage (moving food and liquid through the esophagus to the stomach). Patients with dysphagia are at risk for safety and nutritional deficits and should be evaluated and treated by a speech therapist.

Specific signs of dysphagia include the following:

• Difficulty chewing, loss of food or liquid from the mouth, or excessive residue in the mouth
• Frequent coughing while eating or drinking
• Wet or gurgly vocal quality after drinking
• Recurring pneumonia
• Chronic weight loss or dehydration
• Reflux, or symptoms of heartburn, associated with a feeling of food or liquid "coming back up"

At RehabVisions, assessment of swallowing disorders can be completed by a modified barium swallow study (X-ray video) or tableside clinical assessment. Lake Regional's speech therapy team has superior clinical experience in evaluating and treating swallowing disorders and customizes each treatment plan to each individual's unique needs for optimal outcomes in swallowing and eating.

For more information about dysphagia, please visit the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) website.

Dysarthria is a speech disorder caused by specific or general weakness of the articulators in the mouth: lips, tongue, soft palate, vocal folds and diaphragm. Patients with dysarthria may sound like their speech is slurred and difficult to understand. They may also speak too fast or too softly to be well understood or have poor respiratory support or resonance of sound.

Dysarthria is caused by damage to the brain or nerves descending from the brain. Speech will sound different depending on where the damage occurred in the neurological system, as different speech systems will be affected.

Apraxia is another motor speech disorder that is caused by neurological damage to the brain. It is different than dysarthria, however, because apraxia is not caused by weakness of the oral structures. Instead, the message from the brain to the mouth to plan the movement of each speech sound is disrupted, making it difficult to initiate speech or resulting in groping to achieve the right oral movement to form a word. Apraxia can occur with dysarthria and aphasia.

At RehabVisions, our speech therapy team has many years of experience evaluating and treating motor speech disorders through use of direct training to the affected muscles or neurological deficit and compensations to improve intelligibility and ease of speech production.

Voice changes in adults can occur for several reasons, including neurological (in the brain) changes, injury, infection, hyperfunctional use and unusual growths. Contact your physician for an evaluation if you notice a change in your voice. After the evaluation, you may be sent to an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) doctor. An ENT can see your vocal folds by fitting a small camera through the nose and throat and then viewing the voice box.

Voice difficulty that might require therapy includes:

• Hyperfunctional voice disorder (overusing the voice)
• Paradoxical vocal fold motion (closing the airway during breathing)
• Paralyzed vocal fold
• Vocal nodules (small bumps on the vocal folds caused by overuse)

The voice evaluation will include completion of a case history, perceptual voice measures and instrumental voice measures.

Voice treatment will include:

• Education about how the voice works
• Recommendations for lifestyle changes that can improve the structure or the function of the voice
• Recommendations and treatment activities for changing how the voice is used
• Exercises to improve the strength and efficiency of vocal fold movement

RehabVisions' speech pathologists have years of experience treating voice and work with ENTs throughout the region. Through continuing education, they are able to use up-to-date voice treatment protocols.

Please note: If you have a change in the sound of your voice that lasts more than three weeks, you should always go to your physician for an evaluation. If the treatment prescribed by your physician does not help your voice return to normal, you should schedule an ENT evaluation.