In this video, Fred Stoot, BMRPT, at High Definition Physical Therapy in Englewood, Colorado, answers the question: Are people with a comorbidity more likely to get a concussion?:
Video Transcript:
“Yes, what we know now … that if you have any sort of learning disability, or anxiety, or possibly – for lack of a better term – personality disorders something of that nature, ADHD/ADD. We know these people are much more susceptible after a concussive incident to develop post-concussive syndrome. And that’s a problem because I think there’s lots and lots of kids that participate in sports.
We know that sport is great for ADHD kids and ADD kids because it helps with all the integration. It helps with the integration of their joints and their muscles, again, these balance receptors in your their ears, their vision. It really helps them develop that. However, if they sustained a concussion and you know that they have that history, it’s critical that you get those people to us early. Because being able to identify it early helps us with where we place the rehabilitation, the emphasis we place on it.
And we probably hold those kids out of sport a little longer to make sure that they do the exercises they need to go back and participate in sport and not develop post-concussive syndrome. We know that because they already have a type of integration problem, some a learning problem. Then it just makes sense that if your brain has been injured – and just like a muscle that’s injured, we know it heals in ten to fourteen days – that it’s critical that we do the right things early to allow that brain to heal properly. But at the same time, making sure that these integrative reflexes that occur between balance in the ears, your vision, your joints, and your muscles – we make sure that all those reflexes are maintained properly at a low level.
This allows your brain to recover properly and then move you through that rehabilitative process at a rate that’s appropriate to you get documented. Well, we can see that early on. Documented well early and then before we release you back to sport, we reevaluate you.”
What If I’m Already Seeing Another Doctor?
“One of the big things we’ve done at HDPT is we want to be part of a team. And so each and every day that we’re at work, we receive referrals from vision specialists. We receive referrals from medical doctors, occupational therapists, from other physical therapists that are working basically in that realm of sensory integration or ADHD/ADD – things of that nature. We received lots of referrals from people like that.
Yes, you can ask them to refer to us. We’ll make sure we get all our information to them which would be, I think, a very valuable tool. And bring along all your records so, again, we can have a great baseline to judge when we have you relatively back on track. And certainly, we love input from as many medical professionals as we can. We want to be a part of the team, not just the team, we want to be a part of the team. And we work well with any other medical professional athletic trainers – you know, I’m thinking – neuropsychology any of those people. We integrate very well with them. We don’t do it all. We do very specialized work, but then provide that information to other team members.”