Articles
Filter by Topic
- Adaptive Sport 2
- Artificial Intelligence 1
- Bariatric 1
- Bike Labyrinth 3
- Bone density 1
- Brachial Plexus 2
- Bridging the Gap 1
- Bridging the Gap 1
- Carbonhand 4
- Cardiovascular 1
- Cauda Equina Syndrome 1
- Client Stories 4
- Cognition 1
- Company Updates 3
- Decision Making 2
- Dementia 1
- Denervation 31
- Diabetic Foot 12
- Dressings 1
- Efficiency 1
- Electrotherapy 34
- Epilepsy 1
- Exercise Benefits 34
- FES Cycling 24
- Fatigue 1
- Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) 66
- Gait 2
- Goal Setting 5
- Grip 3
- Guidelines 2
- HRV 1
- Healthspan 2
- History 1
- Indego 13
- Lifestyle 10
- Lower Motor Neuron 2
- Mobility 17
- Motivation 2
- Multiple Sclerosis 1
- NMES 4
- Nerve injury 5
- NexStride 1
- Occupational Therapy 1
- Orthotic 15
- PRAFO 33
- Pain 7
- Parkinsons 2
- Pressure Ulcers 21
- Product Updates 7
- RISE Stimulator 15
Article Length
- 1 minute read 3
- 10 minute read 27
- 11 minute read 4
- 12 minute read 11
- 14 minute read 1
- 15 minute read 15
- 18 minute read 1
- 2 minute read 4
- 24 minute read 1
- 25 minute read 2
- 26 minute read 1
- 28 minute read 1
- 3 minutes read 9
- 4 minute read 33
- 5 Minute read 18
- 6 minute read 6
- 7 minute read 20
- 8 minute read 14
- 9 minute read 4
- FES 2
- FoG 1
- Long Read 1
- PRAFO 1
- Seven Minute Read 1
- awareness 1
- carbonhand 2
- cognitive 1
- cues 1
- freezing gait 1
- freezing of gait 1
- gait 1
- neurological 1
- neuroplasticity 1
- nexstride 2
- occupational therapy 1
- occupational therapy day 1
- orthopaedics 1
- orthotic 1
- parkinson's 1
- pressure 1
- pressure relief 1
- prevention 1
- rehabilitation 2
- stroke 1
- ulcers 1
- world stroke day 1
Training Denervated Muscle With the RISE Stimulator and Its Patient Switcher: From Twitch to Standing
The patient switcher for the RISE Stimulator is a small white box on a long white cable. One rocker switch turns the current on and off. A second sends it to the left leg, the right leg, or both. A curved steel bar on the back hooks over a parallel bar, so the box sits under the hand of the person standing.
The patient switcher is the simplest accessory we supply for the RISE, and you could argue it's the one that takes longest to earn. Someone training denervated thigh muscles will usually spend the best part of a year, often longer, before it has any job to do. Training denervated muscle requires commitment and if it's a long time since injury, it takes consistent effort to be able to produce strong enough contractions to make use of the patient switcher.
A few months into training, once the thighs have started to fill out again, the conversation tends to turn to what all the effort is leading to. Sometimes the question is more direct: will I stand? This article is my answer, from the first twitch to the first stand, and what it takes to do that safely in a hospital gym or at home.
Numbness After a Nerve Injury: What Electrical Stimulation Can and Cannot Do
If you've lost sensation in a hand or foot due to nerve injury, you'll notice that most of the information available focuses on muscle. Muscle wasting, muscle strengthening, preventing atrophy, stimulating a weak limb. Page after page of content. Then you look for something about the numbness, the part that actually bothers you most, and there is very little content available.
I want to address that gap, because there is real evidence that electrical stimulation improves sensory recovery. There is also, as far as I am aware, no evidence that any device you can buy and use at home will bring feeling back to a numb hand. Those two statements sit together and seem to be opposing; the difference between them is worth understanding before anyone sells you anything.
Foot Drop After a Nerve Injury, and Why It Is Not the Same as Foot Drop After a Stroke
We see many people with foot drop, but the cause can vary a great deal and the treatment approach consequently will need to be personalised to the situation. One person has broken a leg; another has dislocated a knee or is recovering from a hip replacement or lumbar spine surgery, and now the foot on that side will not lift. They are catching their toe on every kerb. They have discovered foot drop stimulators online, watched the videos of people walking along a corridor without a brace, and they want to know how to get one.
The videos are genuine. The devices do what they appear to do. But almost every person in those videos has had a stroke, and that difference is not a minor detail. It decides whether that type of device can work for you at all.
I want to explain what a foot drop stimulator is actually doing, why it may do nothing whatsoever for a peroneal nerve injury, and what does matter in the first few months after that kind of injury.
Peripheral Nerve Injury and Electrical Stimulation: Which of Three Situations Are You In?
Someone has damaged a nerve. Perhaps because of a fracture, perhaps a fall, perhaps a complication of surgery they were told would be routine. They have read that electrical stimulation can help prevent muscle wasting. They have bought a device, often an inexpensive TENS unit, sometimes a consumer muscle stimulator. They have put the pads on, turned the intensity up as far as it will go, and nothing has happened. No contraction. No twitch. Nothing at all.
Then, usually near the end of the call, comes the question, and it is nearly always some version of this:
Could I have made it worse?
What a Nerve Conduction Study Actually Tells You, and Why It Matters Before Electrical Stimulation
If you have a nerve injury, whether at the spine or further out in a limb, at some point, someone may send you for a nerve conduction study. You will lie on a couch while a neurophysiologist delivers small electrical pulses to your skin and, a little later, puts a fine needle into one or two muscles. A few weeks after that, a report lands with your consultant. It is dense, full of numbers and abbreviations, and it is written for one clinician to read to another. Almost nobody explains it to the person whose nerve it describes. Just this morning, I read a note from a client who said, "I had a nerve conduction test, which indicated severe injury to the nerves." You might wonder, like me, what severe means, and what do I do about it?
Normal vs Denervated Muscle: Why the Rules of Electrical Stimulation Change After Nerve Injury
It is quite common for us to meet clients who have tried electrical stimulation on a limb and found that nothing happened. No matter how high the intensity was set, the muscle simply would not contract. They arrive frustrated, sometimes having been told that nothing more can be done. When we then use the RISE Stimulator, a specialist device capable of producing the long-impulse-duration waveforms that denervated muscle actually requires, they are often surprised and relieved to see a contraction for the first time.
That moment of surprise reveals an important gap in understanding. The muscle did not fail to respond because it was beyond help. It failed because the wrong electrical 'language' was being spoken. A denervated muscle is not simply a weak muscle. It is, in a very real sense, a different tissue with altered structure, electrical properties, and activation rules. Understanding these differences is the foundation for making sense of any treatment approach.