Natural Health Care

More than 2,400 years, the father of medicine, Hippocrates, recognized and described stroke as “sudden onset of paralysis.” Until recently, modern medicine has had very little to this condition, but the world of medicine concerned with stroke is changing and being developed every day new and better therapies. Today, some people who suffer a stroke can leave the same without disability or disabilities with few, if treated promptly. Physicians today can offer patients who suffer a stroke and their families which so far has been very difficult to offer: hope.

In ancient times stroke was called apoplexy *, a term that physicians applied to anyone suddenly struck by paralysis. Because many conditions can lead to sudden paralysis, the term apoplexy did not indicate specific diagnosis or cause. Doctors knew very little about the cause of stroke and the only established therapy was to feed and care for the patient until it ran its course.

The first person to investigate the pathological signs of apoplexy was Johann Jacob Wepfer. Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1620, studied medicine and was Wepfer the first to identify the signs “postmortem” of bleeding in the brain of patients who died of stroke. In autopsy studies he gained knowledge of carotid and vertebral arteries that supply blood to the brain. Wepfer was also the first person to suggest that stroke in addition to being caused by bleeding in the brain, could also be caused by a blockage of one of the main arteries that supply blood to the brain. Thus, the stroke became known as cerebrovascular disease (“cerebro” refers to a part of the brain, “vascular” refers to blood vessels and arteries).

Medical science would eventually confirm the hypothesis Wepfer, but until recently doctors could offer little in terms of therapy. Over the past two decades, basic and clinical researchers, many of them sponsored and funded in part by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and stroke (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke – NINDS), have learned much about stroke. Have identified major risk factors for this disease and have developed surgical techniques and treatments with drugs for the prevention of stroke. But perhaps the most exciting new development in the field of stroke research is the recent approval of a treatment with drugs that can reverse the course of stroke if given within the first hours after symptoms appear.

Animal studies have shown that brain injury occurs within minutes after the occurrence of a stroke and can become irreversible within a period of one hour. In humans, brain damage begins at the moment the stroke starts and often continues for days afterward the same. Scientists now know that there is a “window of opportunity” too small to treat the most common form of stroke. Because of these and other advances in the field of cerebrovascular disease, patients with these strokes are now likely to survive and recover.

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