Am I a candidate for intensive rehabilitation?
Three conditions decide whether an intensive programme is appropriate — and endurance is a starting level, not a barrier.
Intensive rehabilitation is not right for everyone, and the honest version of this question is answered before you travel rather than after. Three things are assessed.
What we look for
First, medical stability: you must be fit to fly and able to tolerate several hours of therapy a day. Second, a realistic goal that intensive therapy can move — a function to regain, a level of independence to reach. Third, a companion or support arrangement for the stay, which for most neurological programmes is essential rather than optional.
None of these is a formality. A programme built on an unrealistic goal disappoints everyone, and a patient without support at the bedside loses much of what the therapists build during the day.
Endurance is a starting level, not a barrier
People often rule themselves out because they cannot imagine three hours of therapy. That is the wrong test. Endurance is where the programme starts, not what it requires: sessions are shortened and spaced at the beginning and lengthened as tolerance builds, and building tolerance is itself a therapeutic goal.
What genuinely rules a programme out is instability — an unhealed wound, an uncontrolled infection, a cardiac or respiratory problem that makes exertion unsafe. Those are usually reasons to wait rather than reasons to give up.
When we say no
We say no when an intensive programme will not help. That is a smaller group than people expect, but it exists, and being told early is more useful than being given a booking.
Timing also changes what is achievable. Rehabilitation begun in the first months after a neurological event generally has more to work with than the same programme started years later — which does not mean later is pointless, only that the goals are different and should be described differently.
Topic
More in Planning your treatment
- How a rehabilitation plan is written before you travelSix steps from your first message to your return home, and what the written plan commits us to before anyone books a flight.
- The online consultation: what it can and cannot settleA video conversation with a rehabilitation physician before you travel — what it establishes, and the line it does not cross.
