Bob,
Yes, I totally understand that avoiding anything that remotely resembled a sales pitch was important. I highly respect you for that.
My perspective is that you were doing everything during a time period after a stroke, which is when there already is an environment for greater plasticity. That first month window, when the special cells, which operate like stem cells are there.
From my experience, most people are not even finding out about plasticity until after rehab has ended and that is outside of that window. When I was researching everything after my step-mother’s stroke, which was years after my own brain breakdown, they were talking about the majority of people not fully recovering and that most stroke patients feel disappointed with their recovery after 1 year and by then, they have taken rehab away from you, unless you can prove that it is benefiting you. One month after the stroke exactly is when my step-mother was released from the rehab she was in. My cousin and my carpenter’s father both had strokes and were never sent to rehab and never went through any physical therapy. They both just lost some function in their arms. Enough to make life more difficult, but not enough to have the doctors see them as needing physical therapy. The fact that I know more than one person that happened to tells me that it is probably common.
Anyway, I am just not as sure that people outside of those first month and first 3 months windows would benefit the same way you did from just doing the novel exercises. Though I suspect they would benefit some.
I benefitted from Luminosity for a while, but I benefitted much more from dietary changes and PEMF than from any novel exercises and I think looking at Flint Rehab and a rehab which helps people with spinal injuries, often it is the PEMF, TMS, acupuncture, LLLT or other thing like Vibration or Electric Foot massagers, which make a difference.
I am thinking about the novel exercises even now for myself 6 or 7 years later and I am looking for ways to incorporate them, but even reading the testimonial from today on this site. A woman uses the ICES for 15 minutes and she can talk normally for 3 hours. That is hard to figure out how to do a novel exercise to get back that type of function. Not saying that the novel exercises wouldn’t work.
Luminosity is one where I could see some change and then, it plateaus out and by then it is no longer a novel exercise and isn’t as useful and it becomes discouraging instead of encouraging.
PEMF hasn’t become discouraging to me. I went out with friends yesterday and I was telling them about the device and I started listing thing after thing after thing it has helped me with and maybe that is why I like it. I still haven’t hit a plateau where it stopped being useful.
Lowering inflammation and increasing circulation and helping with neuronal pathways never gets old and a woman today at Starbucks said, “I can see such a difference in you” and I talked about how I seem to have gotten rid of social anxiety and I am sleeping and my eyes are working better and I might have lowered inflammation enough that I just don’t have any real depression or anxiety. Those things add up to more confidence and less negativity.
Anyway, I don’t make money from your devices, so I don’t mind giving sales pitches. Not that it works, but as I change, maybe someday it will.
My high school friends said, “You look really good” and a few years ago, I couldn’t walk up and down just the two steps into a house without holding onto things and it took forever to do that and this time I saw them and I walked from the next street over to join them for lunch. That is progress.
