Steps to Follow

A true paradigm shift is taking place in the field of neurology. Earlier it was regarded as the science of exact diagnosis of incurable illnesses, re­ signed to the dogma that damage to the central nervous system could not be repaired: "Once development is complete, the sources of growth and regeneration ofaxons and dendrites are irretrievably lost. In the adult brain the nerve paths are fixed and immutable - everything can die, but nothing can be regenerated" (Cajal1928). Even then this could have been countered with what holds today: rehabilitation does not take place in the test tube, being supported only a short time later by an authoritative source, the professor of neurology and neurosurgery in Breslau, Otfried Foerster. He wrote a 100-page article about thera­ peutic exercises which appeared in the Handbuch der Neurologie (also published by Springer-Verlag). The following sentences from his intro­ duction illustrate his opinion of the importance of therapeutic exercises and are close to our views today