ThinkAgain! Services:
Once children are referred to ThinkAgain (usually through their treating medical team, or through another parent), we review their therapy needs through conversation with parents, reviewing medical history, and existing relevant evaluations. Generally, there are therapies that they need, but are either denied or insufficiently funded by their medical insurance. At times, a family burdened with lengthy cancer treatment, is unable to afford the co-pays of the therapies that are covered, or unable to purchase supportive equipment or orthotics required for these therapies. ThinkAgain steps in where we can to assure these pediatric cancer survivors receive immediate, intensive, appropriate and effective intervention for their cancer-related disabilities.
ThinkAgain may fund any of the following clinic-based intensive rehabilitation therapies:
Educational Therapy is an intervention used to treat individuals with learning disabilities, and challenges in accessing the curriculum. This form of therapy offers a wide range of intensive interventions that are designed to resolve learning problems by improving areas in deficit while learning new strategies of learning, based on the strengths of the learner.
Physical Therapy refers to the various treatment methods used to develop or restore movement, and promote healing and functioning. PT cares for patients who have a temporary or permanent disability due to injury, disease, birth defect or pain. Therapists also evaluate and instruct children in the use of wheelchairs, braces, crutches, walkers, canes or other durable medical equipment. The goal of the PT program is to help the child enjoy life by attaining his/her optimum level of independence.
Occupational Therapy is a skilled treatment that focuses on facilitating development, enhancing function and maximizing independence in all daily life activities. For children, the word "occupation" refers to play, self-care, school work and other activities that occupy a child's time. The focus of Occupational Therapy is to provide services to children with varying deficits or delays, which may include fine motor, sensory-motor, self-care, cognitive and oral motor/feeding skills.
Cognitive rehabilitation is a system of therapeutic activities, based on brain-behavior relationships, directed to achieve functional change by re-establishing or reinforcing previously learned patterns of behavior, establishing new patterns of cognitive activity through compensatory cognitive mechanisms, establishing new patterns of activity through external compensatory mechanisms, and enabling children to make adaptations to their cognitive disability to improve overall functioning.
Speech-language Therapy. Speech and language pathologists are experts in communication, and treat many types of communication and swallowing problems. These include problems with speech sounds, disordered speech, receptive and expressive speech, literacy, social communication, cognitive-communication, voice tempo, and fluency, as well as feeding and swallowing.
Vision therapy is usually prescribed and supervised by specially trained optometrists, who are called behavioral or developmental optometrists.The program of exercises is customized for each patient, and can be done in the office or at home—or, ideally, in both settings. These exercises aim to improve overall vision by strengthening skills such as tracking (eye movement), teaming (eye coordination) and focusing. Conditions associated with vision therapy include amblyopia (“lazy eye”), convergence insufficiency, certain types of strabismus (misaligned eyes) and problems controlling eye movement (known as oculomotor dysfunction).