What is Intensive Aphasia Therapy?

Intensive aphasia therapy is 10-30 hours per week for several weeks.
Neuroplasticity is your brain's ability to form new connections between neurons. This can happen if you've had a stroke or brain injury, but also every day as you learn new things.
Neuroplasticity is accomplished through practice of something over time, so when you study in school or watch a video, you learn by paying attention and storing that information. With aphasia, you may needs lots of practice within a short period of time to form new connections.
Learning something means that you've created a new pattern of neural activation that you can replicate when you need it. So you learn how to say "I have a cat", it forms a pattern of brain cells, and then whenever you want to say or write "I have a cat", these cell patterns are activated. With aphasia, these patterns can become more stable through specific practice over time.
At The Aphasia Center, we provide hierarchies of specific practice (a customized plan) for 5 hours a day for 4-8 weeks at a time. This helps learning new patterns and retrieval of those patterns so that they become more stable. We start with the level of help the client needs to be successful, then gradually decrease that help so that the client becomes more independent.
For the past 30 years, independent research has consistently shown that intensive treatment is the best way to make faster progress in aphasia recovery. There are some skills that won't get better doing 2-3 hours per week because they need more specific practice. That's where we come in.
While we can't cure your aphasia, we can provide the right plan for you based on your strengths. As aphasia experts, we've been helping families with aphasia for over 10 years.
For more information, you can call us at 727-823-2529 or visit our website at www.theaphasiacenter.com.