This presentation from the 2023 AACPDM Community Forum presents and overview and a model creating opportunities for employment for individuals with disabilities.
The Cerebral Palsy Foundation has created a factsheet to help guide you in understanding and treating pain with CP. This fact sheet has been created for individuals with cerebral palsy to provide basic guidance surrounding common causes and potential treatment of pain.
Cerebral palsy refers to a group of conditions that are caused by problems in brain development and that affect how movement and motor control happen in children. Problems with walking and talking are often the way people start a conversation about cerebral palsy.
When you use alternate means of communication it can be really frustrating to go out in community. It is hard to know whether people are understanding you and whether they will take the time to listen. A lot of times it's hard for people to admit that they're not always comfortable with a device or a wheelchair or person who does things differently. So the more we can expose and educate people the better off we all will be. When we talk about acceptance, we're not just talking about people in society accepting people with disabilities. We're also talking about people with disabilities who are using alternate means of communication and how difficult it is for them to be out in the community.
"Cerebral palsy is primarily a motor impairment so it's really important to look at what the child’s motor function is. Are they developing on the trajectory of a child who has cerebral palsy or are they developing as we would expect a baby to develop? "
One of the things that we typically forget when we look at kids who have conditions like CP, is that they're first and foremost, children.
The World Health Organization has developed the ‘International Classification of Function’. This gives us a way to think about any health condition. Here we can see many ideas that we need to think about with CP. We can also see how these many ideas are connected to one another.
Cerebral Palsy affects body movement, muscle control, muscle coordination, muscle tone, reflex, posture and balance. Depending on the part of the brain that is injured depends on how someone’s muscle tone will be effected. For people with spastic CP they have increased muscle tone because of the part of the brain that's injured. If causes very tight muscles which in turn effects the movement of the joints and of the limbs. For others who have dyskinetic CP they lose the ability to have voluntary control over their muscles, and they can have jerky and uncontrolled movement patterns.