Question
Are drill‑based practices ever appropriate for TBI patients?
Answer
Yes. There is a movement away from just drill-based treatment but drill-based therapy does seem to help with post acute patients. Especially if you are looking at attention and problem-solving, that highly intense, repeated practice of those things is effective when you include the self‑regulatory or self‑monitoring technique. It goes beyond just a drill-based practice but includes the person monitoring themselves while they're doing it. This is most appropriate for more chronic patients at a high‑level of intensity.
Angela Hein Ciccia, Ph.D., CCC-SLP is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Program, Department of Psychological Sciences at Case Western Reserve University. Her research focuses on the area of social information processing, or social cognition, in the school-age and adolescent TBI population. Clinically Dr. Ciccia sees patients with a variety of neurogenic communication disorders across the lifespan.
