Myth 1: Rehabilitation can be restored to the state before the onset of the disease. Many people believe that rehabilitation is, as the name implies, the restoration of health. Through rehabilitation training, the function of the arms and legs that cannot move after a stroke can be restored to the same state as before the stroke. If they can’t recover, they lose confidence and even blame the medical staff for their lack of skills. In fact, the reason why hemiplegia remains after a stroke is because the brain tissue is damaged, and the damaged brain tissue cannot be repaired and restored, so the lost body functions cannot be fully restored to the state before the onset of the stroke. The correct understanding of rehabilitation training should be: “through training, stimulate the brain cells around the damaged brain tissue, so that they can learn to replace the work of the damaged brain tissue” “through a variety of ways to assist the lost motor function of the hands and feet, to help patients return to their families and social life “. For example, rehabilitation trainers help patients who are unable to move their arms and legs after paralysis to eventually dress and walk on their own; install braces for walking training for lower extremities that are unable to move freely after paralysis; train patients with right hemiplegia to use their healthy left hand instead of their right; or restrict the movement of the healthy hand and force the use of the paralyzed hand to promote improved function: modify the interior of homes to make them more accessible to people with disabilities; and help patients obtain a disability. The patient is encouraged to return to the family and society while living with the disability. Myth 2: Rehabilitation should only begin once the patient has stabilized When should a stroke patient begin rehabilitation? In the past, the opinion was that for safety reasons, it should not begin until the patient’s condition is stable. The current view is that the earlier the rehab, the better, and that it should be implemented from the day the patient is brought to the hospital in tandem with treatment. If a patient who has suffered a stroke is bedridden and does not move after treatment has begun, he or she may suffer from muscle strength loss, stiffness in the joints of the arms and legs, and bed sores caused by motor paralysis. Some patients may also be at risk for systemic complications such as pulmonary embolism, misopharyngeal pneumonia, and infections. In addition to reducing the above-mentioned adverse effects, an important benefit of starting rehabilitation training early is that patients can gain the ability to perform daily activities as soon as possible and return to society as soon as possible. It can be seen that the earlier the rehabilitation training for hemiplegic stroke patients is started, the better. Starting training early not only does not aggravate the disease, but also reduces the mortality rate. The more training you do, the better the functional recovery effect. Misconception 3: The uncompromising care of family members is beneficial to the patient’s functional improvement The opposite is true: the uncompromising care of family members can prevent the patient’s functional improvement. The research team of Professor Jianan Li of Nanjing Medical University, a renowned rehabilitation expert, observed a very interesting phenomenon: patients with large families had poorer recovery of daily living skills than those with small families. Due to the large number of family members, everyone competes to show care to the patients and many activities of daily living are done by family members instead, reducing the training opportunities for the patients. Patients with cerebral stroke hemiplegia often have ambivalent psychology. On the one hand, they feel that they cannot take care of themselves and have to rely on others for everything, and have a strong sense of guilt. People who turn out to be very strong will have an even greater sense of lack and their self-esteem will be hurt. On the other hand, many people will become very dependent. They want their family members to pay attention to them at all times, and because they lack self-confidence, they place more importance on their family members’ attitudes toward them. In this case, family members also tend to accommodate the patient and do everything for him or her, fearing that the patient will feel left out. The correct attitude of the family should be to give more psychological care to the patient, while letting the patient do as much as possible in daily life, and always expressing joy at every bit of progress made by the patient. Sometimes it is also possible to deliberately create opportunities for the patient to help others in order to promote the patient’s recovery of self-confidence and self-esteem. Myth 4: It is useless to do rehabilitation training more than six months after the onset of stroke As mentioned earlier, the earlier the rehabilitation training for hemiplegic stroke patients, the better. Early recovery is faster after the onset of the disease, but more than six months later. Due to muscle spasm and joint deformation, the effect of rehabilitation training will be much worse, especially many patients cannot persist due to pain. However, with the progress of rehabilitation medicine, the use of new rehabilitation training methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and Kawahira-type nerve promotion method in recent years has made it possible to obtain better results even for patients who have been suffering from stroke for a longer period of time after the onset of stroke. In particular, the combined use of botulinum toxin therapy (a treatment for muscle spasm) and rehabilitation training has made a big difference.