Daily Maestroism

DM #192

Thursday, December 1st, 2016

DM #192: Another one that makes sense when you read it, and yet, we ignore it in practice.
Visualization is a technique that has been used forever, by folks of all kinds of functionality. It can be hugely powerful, and be the difference between success and failure.
However, visualization, just like movement, has prerequisites, or fundamentals upon which it is built. Earlier today I posted a video of mirror box therapy, a technique that we were learning in the Graded Motor Imagery course that I took. As I mentioned in the post, mirror box therapy is actually the third and final step in this form of treatment. First we must concern ourselves with implicit and then explicit motor imagery.
What does this mean? Before we seek to use any sort of visualization in treatment, we must make sure that the patient can in fact properly visualize. Implicit motor imagery speaks to a person's ability to discern the left and right. We take this for granted, and in fact, often times this ability gets lost in the presence of chronic pain, injury, and other various pathological states.
For those of you still with me, I'm speaking to a person's ability to identify the body part as right or left (i.e. a right foot or hand) when looking at a picture of it. Sounds incredibly easy, but you'd be surprised at the results you get. My recommendation is that you read up on graded motor imagery, with one of the best sources being @noigroup. They even have an app! ?? Take home: If you're treating pain or movement dysfunction and you're not treating the brain, you're missing the boat.

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