Rehabilitation has its own vocabulary, and much of it appears on discharge papers and insurance letters without explanation. The terms below are the ones families ask about most.
Care and assessment
ADLs (activities of daily living): eating, dressing, bathing, toileting, transferring and walking. IADLs add cooking, shopping, managing money and medication. FIM (Functional Independence Measure): an 18-item score from 18 to 126 that rates how much help a patient needs; it is used to track progress and to justify continued inpatient care. Physiatrist: a physician specialised in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Case manager: the person who coordinates discharge, equipment and insurance.
Conditions
Aphasia: loss of language after a stroke or injury, affecting speaking, understanding, reading or writing. Dysphagia: difficulty swallowing. Hemiparesis: weakness on one side of the body. Spasticity: involuntary muscle tightness after damage to the brain or spinal cord. Neglect: reduced awareness of one side of space, common after right-hemisphere strokes. Complete and incomplete injury: in spinal cord injury, whether any sensation or movement is preserved below the level of injury, graded on the ASIA scale from A (complete) to E (normal). Post-traumatic amnesia: the period after a brain injury during which new memories are not formed; its length predicts outcome.
Therapies and equipment
PT, OT, SLP: physical, occupational and speech-language therapy. Gait training: relearning to walk, sometimes with body-weight support or a robotic exoskeleton. Constraint-induced therapy: restraining the stronger arm to force use of the weaker one. AFO: ankle-foot orthosis, a brace that supports a weak foot. Prosthesis: an artificial limb; orthosis: a brace that supports an existing limb. Assistive technology: any device from a reacher to a speech-generating computer. DME (durable medical equipment): wheelchairs, hospital beds and similar items that insurance may cover.
Levels of care
Acute rehabilitation (inpatient rehabilitation facility, IRF): at least three hours of therapy a day. Subacute or skilled nursing facility: lower intensity, longer stay. Day rehab: full therapy days while living at home. Outpatient: scheduled visits. Home health: therapists and nurses visiting the home.
This site is an independent reference on rehabilitation medicine.
