The Effect of Thai Traditional Medicine in Stroke Patients with Intermediate Care at Primary Care Unit Chiangrai Prachanukroh Hospital

Abstract

Background: Thai traditional medicine plays a role to maintain and restore health. It is one of the services in government hospitals to integrate patient care with modern medicine and other multidisciplinary team. A study comparing the effectiveness of Thai massage with previous standard treatments in paraplegic patients found that Thai massage helps to restore their daily activities with statistical significance, but no study was performed in patients with stroke in Intermediate care.

Objective: To study the effectiveness of Thai traditional medicine in stroke patients in Intermediate care of Chiangrai Prachanukroh Hospital

Methods: This is a quasi-experimental research using one group pre-post test design by using traditional Thai medicine techniques. We corrected data including basic information such as gender, age, congenital disease, type of stroke, rehabilitation, the ability in daily living activities using the Modified Barthel Index, the ROM, and the pain in the weak side of the shoulder using the Numerical Pain Rating Scale and the health’s quality of life using the Thai version of the EQ-5D-5L questionnaire. Data analysis using descriptive statistics, and Wilcoxon’s signed rank test statistics were used to compare before and after scores in Pain Scale, BI, and QOL score.

Results: After receiving 10 times of traditional Thai medicine services, the physical assessment before and after was not significantly different. However, it was found that subjects had swallowing problems reduced from 55.56 percent to 27.78 percent (p-value-=0.176) and shoulder problems decreased from 38.89 percent to 27.78 percent (p-value-=0.725). As, the ability to do daily activities and health quality of life scores showed the statistically significantly different. It increased from 7.17 ±4.73 to 12.83 ±7.00 points (p-value <0.001) and 40.33 ±22.74 points to 76.77 ± 25.86 points (p-value <0.001), respectively. While the average pain score decreased from 2.78 ±2.37 points, the remaining 1.89 ±1.81 points but not statistically different (p-value 0.077).

Conclusions and recommendations: Rehabilitation with Thai traditional medicine services in stroke patients in the intermediate care showed the effective result for improving the daily activities and the quality of life. Thus, the hospitals should be promoted the wide services of the Thai traditional.