If you want muscles or nerves to react you have to stimulate them. If all is well that stimulation mostly originates in your brain, or is at least processed there. If all is not that well, then you can use ice sticks, right? Ice sticks. What else would you use?

This is what one of Pádraig’s SLT here asked. What else would you use? Is anyone stimulating those muscles in his face to get them back to work? The muscles you use to turn up your nose at something, the ones you use to smile, use to frown or to press your lips against each other. (You will notice that I pressed the wrong button when I tried to capture what she did today;)

The good thing about ice sticks is that you can prepare them yourself at almost no cost: just fill a syringe with water and put it into the freezer.

The treatment is called PNF or: Propriozeptive Neuromuskuläre Facilitation, and is explained (for those who speak German:) in: die Behandlung von Fazialisparesen: Stimulation der orofazialen Muskulatur durch PNF.

Here is what the therapist does, using stimuli in a specific order: (1) thee strokes using ice across the muscles; (2) “tapping” to dry the skin using gauze (or pulp cloth); (3) “stretch” the muscles; (4) pull/push muscles against resistance.

It’s that easy. And effective. I learned something new today (and will try to record it again tomorrow, hopefully pressing the correct button).