An evening, just like any other, Ankush, a 10 year old jovial boy – 4^th standard student in Delhi greets you with a limp in his walk and an unintentional deep look; not matching his welcoming words – “I will be able to run with my friends soon, isn’t it?”. It was more of a hopeful reaction than a question. The hope was on my duty as a physical therapist, to manage his concerns, a result of disabling stroke two years ago.

Now, I am a bit sick of hearing about a needless necessity in rehabilitation of stroke – Physical therapist (PT), largely a result of mass ignorance not restricted only to society but even in the medical fraternity, how others do not want to recognize the importance and efforts of such dedicated professionals working on the science of movement engineering – building movements, correcting alignments, giving structure and shape to movements in shambles. This is not to shout out my own praise, but to highlight how much a stroke survivor and a physical therapist need each other.

Stroke is a challenge to both, challenge is what makes you grow, with variable physical and mental consequences affecting lifestyle and productive return to work, a larger probability of living with a disability for the rest of life – an increased burden on care giving family, smaller families and inadequate reimbursements covered in health policies for physical therapy services just increase the burden across this wide class. These circumstances should be enough to push for a cooperative inclusion of specialist physical therapist services.

I don’t think that anyone will contest the fact that in this time of microspecialization and nanoscience, physical therapy as a science can remain untouched – one cannot deny that stroke care needs a specialist – not a generalist. With physical therapists already engaged in the rehabilitation and care of stroke, just due to its sheer magnitude, it makes sense for a special cadre of stroke therapists. We need an army; a task force; a mechanism to understand the minutest intricacies of this well recognized disabling but manageable, treatable and sometimes preventable stroke, which we understand but hardly manage well.

Few dedicated PTs in India have created a value for their name after years of dedicated work in this field – Dr Nilima Patel (Vadodara), Dr Hari Ohm (Chennai), Dr D Thiagarajan (Chennai) to name a few. But we need collaborations and entry of experts, technology, academicians, educationists to lead the way forward. We need to evolve naturally into something more than just a PT – evolve our techniques into science........

Today, I raise this idea worth putting forward to all – “recognize this need before the problem triggers out”.......... create specialists, it’s the need of the hour

Harpreet Singh Sachedv (PT),

Master of Physiotherapy (Neurosciences)

AIIMS, New Delhi