Neural Plasticity:
Can It Inform The Treatment Of Dysphagia?
Recording Available August 1st – 0.8 ASHA CEUS
Presented by: Dr. Jeffrey Kleim, Ph.D.
Do you assess and treat dysphagia?
If the answer is heck yes, then you might be particularly interested in this 8-hour course dedicated to your work!
Introducing a pre-recorded neuro-intensive educational journey into the world of dysphagia and brain plasticity…
Neural Plasticity: Can it Inform the Treatment of Dysphagia?
By Dr. Jeffrey Kleim, PhD.
Dysphagia exercises do more than just improve muscle strength or range of motion…
They also have very specific impacts on our patients’ brains.
And if we can learn what those impacts are and how they occur, we can be even more informed during our dysphagia therapy planning process.
In This Course, You'll Learn Things Like …
- The concept of neural plasticity
- The behavioral/neural signals that drive plasticity
- The neural and behavioral strategies that drive effective treatment of dysphagia in the context of neural plasticity
- Factors influencing neural plasticity in the context of treating dysphagia
Dr. Kleim has his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and has worked closely with PTs, OTs and SLPs over the last 25 years to try and understand how neuroplastic changes within the CNS direct functional recovery across numerous domains (i.e. how neuroplasticity contributes to the recovery process of eating, walking, talking, etc…)
He also serves on the editorial advisory boards for the Journal of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair and the Journal of Physical Therapy.
His main focus?
To develop adjuvant therapies to promote brain plasticity and enhance functional recovery after brain injury or disease.
In other words…to harness the brain’s innate ability to adapt in order to create novel, more effective rehabilitation strategies.
“[During my research at the Brain Rehab Center] we found that different types of therapy had different impacts on the brain and behavior. This is how I found out how incredibly complex swallowing is…No wonder it’s so hard to rehabilitate! There’s a lot going on!”
-Dr. Jeffrey Kleim from episode 198 of the Swallow Your Pride Podcast
As a researcher with over 90 papers published about neuroplasticity and exercise, he is neck-deep in this topic- a topic critical to our work as dysphagia-treating clinicians.
Dr. Kleim stands out in the crowd of researchers in that he focuses on the clinical applicability of his research.
He was even challenged once by a physical therapist friend of his, asking him this honest question:
“What does [your research] buy me when I go to the clinic on Monday and I tell my patients, ‘Hey your brain’s changing’? They don’t care. They just want to comb their hair and brush their teeth…”
That’s when Dr. Kleim started to speak the language of clinicians and directly work with therapists who have their feet on the ground in clinical settings.
So, silence your beepers and put your work email in ‘vacation mode,’ because he’s about to blow your mind with information like…
What neural plasticity is and why we should care
How to measure neural plasticity
What experience-dependent neural plasticity is
Behavioral signals that drive plasticity
Neurological causes of dysphagia
How to drive neural signals to enhance clinical outcomes
What to know about (and do with) motor learning, sensory learning, and cognitive learning
Recovery vs compensation in neurorehabilitation
Biofeedback and sensors
Behavioral strategies
Neural strategies
How development and aging influence plasticity and clinical outcomes
It’s a lot. It’s important. And it’s relevant.
If you’re looking for in-depth content to grow your understanding of what the brain does during therapy…
…and how to translate that knowledge into improved (and patient-specific) dysphagia therapy…