PALSPromotingAmputeeLife Skills

About Recovery and Rehabilitation

Limb loss impacts your body, mind, and activity. Limb loss impacts your body mechanics, your gait and can lead to pain. Because pain is a stressor, pain impacts your body leading to muscle tension, fatigue, and sleep problems. Limb loss is a psychological challenge as you need to adapt to a new body and a new image of yourself. This can lead to negative thinking and worry. These negative thoughts can eventually make you feel overwhelmed, sad, angry or anxious. You may do less or do things differently due to social pressures, how other react, pain or changes in function. All this is going on while you continue being you.

Effective rehabilitation and self-management helps the body, mind, and activity. Because limb loss affects many parts of your health and life, you need an approach that covers them all. Medications and physical or occupational therapy help the body recover. To help your mind – you can learn to relax and avoid negative thinking. Working with prosthetists helps with function and activity. Learning to balance rest and activity also helps keep you keep active.

Effective rehabilitation and recovery requires you to do your part. Health professionals can help treat a specific problem and your prosthetist can help, but they can’t do it alone. You also play an important part in your recovery. Taking a self-management approach to your treatment can lead to better outcomes.

About Self-Management

You are in charge. While doctors and other health care professionals can help, much of your health depends on you, and what you do.

Skills based. Learning about self-management is a good first step. Research shows it is important to learn and practice specific skills – relaxation, reducing negative thinking, effective communication and balancing rest and activity, being active. These skills help you improve your recovery and quality of life

Set goals and track your progress. Self-management is also about setting goals for your recovery. Effective programs help you break these goals down into achievable steps and track your progress toward your goals.

Tailored to your specific needs. Self-management programs have been developed for people with a variety of health conditions. We know that programs work best when they are tailored to a person’s specific needs. PALS Online Take Charge was designed specifically for people with limb loss. Experts in the fields of rehabilitation, nursing, prosthetics, psychology and most importantly people with limb loss have contributed to the development of PALS Online. As a result, the program is customized to meet the specific needs of people like you.

Builds Confidence. Self-management programs help build your confidence in managing life after limb loss. As you develop your skills, and experience success, you are better able to handle challenges when they come.