When someone suffers from a stroke, even a minor one, recovering from that stroke can be a slow and difficult process. Understanding what causes a stroke and why recovery is so slow will help you to choose the right treatment for you or someone you love.

Causes of Strokes and Traditional Recovery

A stroke is caused when lesions appear on one side of the brain causing limbs to refuse to function properly on the opposite side of the body. Traditional rehabilitation for a stroke involves repeated exercises, which strengthens the brain cells around the liasons, which allows you to recover movement in the limbs and the part of the body that have been affected.

Why Rehabilitation/Recovery is Such a Slow Process

Rehabilitation and regaining use of the affect parts of the body is often an extremely slow process and there is a good reason for this. When lesions occur on one side of the brain, the unaffected side of the brain becomes hyperactive prohibiting the side with the lesion from improving. This means that any rehabilitation exercises are fighting against your own brains activity in order to strengthen the lesions side of the brain. This slows the recovery process and makes recovery extremely difficult. However, advances in the medical field have discovered a way to speed your ability to recover from a stroke by using TMS in one of two ways. 

How TMS can Help Stroke Victims Heal Faster

TMS or Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation can be used in one of two different ways in order to help stroke victims recover faster.

One way TMS can be use on the side of the brain that has lesions to help strengthen the surrounding area faster by stimulating that side of the brain while the stroke victim takes part in the rehabilitation exercises designed to make new pathways in their brain, which helps to increase placiticty.
The other way TMS can be used to help stroke victims recover faster is to use The TMS pulses on the good side of the brain to slow down the hyperactivity of that side of the brain allowing the lesion side of the brain to heal on its own. Again you will need to combine the TMS therapy with traditional rehabilitation exercises to help your brain heal.
Results of using TMS therapy in conjunction with regular rehabilitation therapies shows that stroke recovery process is often of shorter duration and people recover from their strokes faster when TMS is use.