Taking care of oneself is not just taking medicine or doing exercises. Self-care with RA is about understanding yourself as a person.
Working with symptoms is not enough. What I have learned through these 18 years is that I am really interested in the person, I have realized that although we must deal with the presenting symptoms, what is most important is to emphasize education when the person is not in an acute crisis so creating a better order and understanding of the person with awareness can really make a difference,to prevent future problems, rather than focusing only on the patient’s symptoms I should engage the person to take care of self and to be educated to have a higher quality of life.
Treatments that I recommend are :
Manual therapy , listen to the body and wait for the person´s nervous system to respond so that motion restrictions are diffused as the client’s awareness grows. Also the use Swedish massage, lymphatic drainage, and other massage techniques.
Movement education and body awareness are important aspects of the exercise therapy so patients can adequately adapt and maintain new movement and alignment patterns. Patients can change the way they perceive and understand their bodies through movement awareness.
Hydrotherapy ,since many of RA patients have limitations, water should be a key point within the RA program. Exercises, movements and aerobics could be done also in water starting with mobility exercises and progressing slowly into cardiovascular and resistance exercises. The work of Integral Aquatic Therapy works with the fascial and joint restrictions of the client within the lower-gravity environment of a heated swimming pool. In this method, the client is supported by the water and held by therapist ́s arms and with some floats while being moved in ways that are not easily accessible on a table so as to achieve fascial release and activation of the parasympathetic nervous system.
The aim is to educate each person to live in his or her own body; something that is missing many times in rheumatism treatment. Patients tend to only live when they have pain. When they are fine, they are not really enjoying their bodies. To live in their body is what I want for them. Come back to the body. Come back to your own perception. Come back and feel you are alive.
The 3H program that I have created offers the RA clients time to recognise and learn to respect the potential of their ability on any given day, neither forcing an unrealistic expectation of performance nor being hindered by the physical limitations of the previous day. In my opinion this acknowledgement and acceptance of being in the present is very important for the manual therapy that I do named fascial release.
Our thoughts, our emotions, our postures, and movements are the history of our lives and they have taken toll during the years.
