Director of the International Biophilia Rehabilitation Academy
Opole Medical School, Opole, Poland
Greetings
I welcome with pleasure the opportunity to attend the 14th International
Biophilia Rehabilitation Conference (IBRC) to be held in a small mountainous
resort of Ustron in southwestern Poland on 6-7 October 2017. The venue
of the conference is a rehabilitation sanitarium. It is not an accidental
choice as the conference is devoted to modern rehabilitation approaches.
Rehabilitation is the field of many virtues, which focuses on the care
of individuals and communities. It provides therapy, often combined with
a diet or exercise regimen, for rest and recuperation so that convalescents
attain and maintain optimal health and quality of life. Although rehabilitation
is often understood as reestablishing bodily functions damaged after major
external traumatic or diseased neurological events, it notably concerns
the physical and mental spheres of the chronically ill and the aged.
The IBRC is a scientifically focused conference that would lay a forum
for the expert exchanges and discussions on the ways to revolutionize the
rehabilitation field to be able to cope with a sharply increasing population
of the elderly worldwide, and thus increasing morbidity requiring post-treatment
physical and mental rehabilitation on the one side, and a deepening shortage
of certified rehabilitators, which causes a dissonance between demand and
need, on the other side. The IBRC covers a wide range of critically important
issues, from basic research to innovations, in the field of rehabilitation.
The conference advocates a change in the rehabilitation paradigm consisting
of so-called motivated rehabilitative exercise that involves the patient’s
own psychosomatic skills to reacquire lost functions. Motivated rehabilitation
activates the brain’s dormant reserves and appears conducive to patient
satisfaction and well-being and also lowers the rehabilitation burden and
costs. The conference aims to drive policy changes that would meet the
health needs of patients and the expectations of society. This is a remarkable
event that brings together a mix of academicians, clinical practitioners,
and allied professionals interested in discussing novel research, innovative
ideas, and models of best rehabilitation practice.
The 2017 IBRC is posed to restructure the rehabilitation field to help
avoid becoming frail and disabled.