Bobath Therapy is known in the medical profession to be one of the most highly regarded forms of treatment for children with neurological conditions.
Southern Children’s Physiotherapy offers Bobath therapy for the assessment and treatment of your child. See staff profile section of this website for further details.
Bobath Physiotherapy is a neurological approach to the treatment of persons with cerebral palsy and other allied neurological conditions. The key to Bobath therapy is to help your child develop mobility and function through ‘normalising’ their movement patterns. This can be done by specific handling, and helping your child to limit/change more abnormal movements, and postures. This is relevant for children presenting with hypertonia (stiffness), hypotonia (floppiness) and also children with ataxia and athetosis; by helping them to gain more stability and control over their movement.
If your child has difficulty exploring their environment, then they will be unable to develop and learn new skills through exploration. At SCP, we aim to provide you with treatment techniques, ideas and positions that will help with this, and enable your child to acquire new skills.
Your child’s muscle tone is changeable. Using the Bobath approach at SCP we are aiming to influence this tone and also to show you ways that this can be done during every day functional activities. A child needs to have more normalised tone to achieve movement. For example, a child with increased stiffness will require less spasticity (stiffness) to be able to move. A floppy (hypotonic) child will require more activity in their muscles to be able to move and the child with athetosis needs to be able to gain more control over their movements.
No one child presents the same – even if two children have exactly the same diagnosis. Your child is therefore entitled to a specific and individual assessment, which in turn will mean a specific and individualised physiotherapy programme the most appropriate for them.
