-: My name is Iman Jeroush.
I am a physical therapist.
I specialize in working with people
who have neurological injuries.
I've been doing this for nine years.
As a neurotherapist, I see patients on the hour
and I never have an overlap of patients.
So, I work eight hours a day, I see seven patients
because I have that lunch hour halfway though.
My variety of case load could be anywhere from
Lou Gehrig's disease, which is ALS, Parkinson's disease,
a spinal cord injury, somebody who's been paralyzed
who can not use their arms or legs
or a spinal cord injury who can use their arms and legs
and they're just trying to get that strength back.
So, when a patient first comes in,
we do a full assessment to distinguish
what kinds of issues are they having?
Is it balance, strength?
Are they having trouble walking?
Are they tight in some of their muscles
and then we develop a plan of care to determine
what do we need to address in order to get them back into
walking, so they can go back to school
or climbing ladders, so they can get back to work.
Things like that, so
after the evaluation and setting up the treatment plan,
we will then see these patients
for multiple sessions, sometimes it's two to three times
a week and for maybe 12 weeks or even six months.
I've even had patients up for a year or two years,
working to get them back on their feet
and doing the things that they want to do.
So, if I was going to be working with somebody
who had a spinal cord injury or a brain injury,
I would probably consider using a treadmill,
so we strap them up onto a harness.
We might want to unweight their body a little bit
in order for them to be able to put weight
through their legs, not be so fearful
of standing and getting back into walking.
And then at times, we might have more than one person
working with that person, moving their legs forward,
teaching them how to walk again
and trying to get them back to the nitty gritty.
Something that we take advantage of so easily,
putting one foot in front of the other,
it's something that we really have to work
on getting them to tap back into their system,
to learn how to do again.