Nat, I have given it a chance - I did a course on CE when i worked in London, used it in groups I ran for preschoolers with cp, and worked very closely with a couple of centres in London when children I was treating were attending them instead of mainstream school.
What I was trying to say was - no therapy works if its just seen as a "sessional" thing, whether its one session a week, 4 hours a week or 5 days a week in a specialist centre. The follow up needs to happen at home - even CE wouldnt work if you just let your child lounge around getting into hypertonic patterns the rest of the time.
The nhs will never be able to fund as much treatment as most families would like to have.
But the crux of the matter is this - how much is enough?
If a child with severe spastic quadriplegia had physio 24/7, how much would they improve?
How much "better" would you expect them to get? And how much input should come from a therapist, and how much should be part of everyday life at home?
You said your DD had a hemiplegia. I have never, in over 20 years, met a hemiplegic child who didnt walk, regardless of the therapy input they had. In some places where diagnosis is poor and often late, they are sometimes walking before they actuially see the physio!
Listen, i really dont want to upset anyone, but CE is not available everywhere, and unless the family are properly educated in what it involves, it doesnt work any better than any other therapy.
A good therapist will explain what they are doing, why, and how you can follow it up at home. A poor one wont, therefore leaving the family feeling helpless and unempowered, not knowing what to do next.
Some families seem to have a natural understanding of their child#'s condition, and instinctively know how to work and play with them. But many are still in a degree of denial, and really want someone to take it all away for them. And then no amount of therappy will be enough, because there is never a point of "cure".
Thats the hardest part of paediatric physiotherapy, we so seldom get to discharge our patients! (Its also a nice thing in a way, as the children sometimes grow up with us.) But wioth CP in particular, although we might do more or less input at different stages of life, we are usually around until a child leaves school.
God, sorry, Ive gone on so much. I probably didnt express myself very well in the last post, and afterwards I did wonder if it would kick off. But it wasnt meant like that.
I wish everybody could have the amount of therapy they felt happy with. But TBH, what you might see is some children with almost no functional difficulties, whose parents wanted non stop treatment to make them perfect, while other more accepting families just got on with it themselves.
We will never be able to give exactly the "right" amount, because in spite of research, no one knows what that amount is for any individual. It all boils down to the therapists experience and resources.
Sorry if ive offended anyone.