Aquatic Therapy is Serious Fun! and benefit your health and wellness. Systems that benefit from aquatic therapy are: Circulatory System. After the patient’s wounds have healed and before prosthetic rehab, amputees can still get intense cardiovascular workouts with aqua therapy. Pulmonary System. The water’s hydrostatic pressure helps improve respiratory function without overtaxing the body. The water also allows the patient to become vertical without bearing weight on the residual limb, which is important to improving pulmonary function. Musculoskeletal System. Increasing one’s strength before prosthetic training will help the amputee transition to weight-bearing activities on land. Early gait training activities can also be initiated in the pool before similar land-based activities. Individuals can obtain greater range of motion in knee and hip joints, which can stiffen from prolonged periods of time sitting in a wheelchair. Central and Peripheral Nervous Systems. Warm water relaxes the body, allowing the patients to decrease focus on the stressors of everyday life. For amputees with significant pain, aquatic therapy is often more tolerable than land-based therapy. The warm water decreases pain perception, allowing amputees to perform more exercises in the water with less pain than the equivalent landbased exercises. Mental Benefits. Being in the water leads to a change in mood. The amputee’s ability to move more freely in the water and participate in the same activities as other patients allows for a feeling of normalcy. The social aspect of being in the pool also improves mood. After a while, the benefits of aquatic therapy overlap. By engaging in cardiovascular exercise, for example, weight loss becomes more easily achieved. Increasing one’s strength can lead to improvements in balance and gait. Water therapy might also lead to the enjoyment of adaptive water sports. Adaptive kayaking and scuba diving, for instance, can lead patients to experience new activities that they might not otherwise try, either with their families and friends or with others in the adaptive sports community. If used in association with therapy, it can allow the patient to recover more quickly and effectively.
Posted on: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 23:52:25 +0000
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