Introduction
Veronica Rowe: I appreciate the opportunity to be able to speak with you today. I have a lot of information to cover, so let’s dive right in and get started. First I would like to try out that thumbs up icon and ask, “How many of you have used constraint induced movement therapy in any form?” Great. This presentation is meant for those, who have never heard of it or maybe have heard of it and know nothing about it, or those that have used it; hopefully I can give all of you some more information to begin a program or enhance your current program.
History
I want to start off with a little bit of history about constraint induced therapy. This type of therapy had its origins way back in 1895 with Mott and Sherrington who were working with monkeys. They found that when one arm of a monkey was deafferented to have no sensory input, they could move it, but the monkey still would not use the arm.
Munk added to this research in 1909 with deafferented monkeys. He took away their sensory capabilities in one arm, but he also took away use and constrained the other arm or the unaffected upper extremity. He found that when he did this, a type of forced use, the monkeys actually started using the affected upper extremity more.
Ogden and Franz (1917) took this information one step further. Instead of just doing a deafferentation of the sensory input to the arm, they actually induced a cortical lesion and a experimentally produced hemiplegia. Similar to Munk, they used a force use method of not allowing use of the unaffected arm and hand, but also added some behavioral components as well. Whenever the animal would use the affected arm and hand in any way, they would be given some positive feedback.
From all of this basic information, Edward Taub of Alabama, coined the term constraint-induced therapy. He took that idea of learned nonuse, found from Mott and Sherrington, and combined that with the constraint induced therapy, the behavioral aspects of encouraging the animal to use that affected upper extremity, all while restraining the unaffected extremity.
