Articles

Each year approximately 2.8 million Americans sustain a traumatic brain injury, a saddening percentage of whom are young children and teenagers who, along with seniors, comprise the population most likely to sustain this condition. Fortunately, for many such children, Totally Kids Rehabilitation Hospital continues to provide the hope, treatment, and interdisciplinary care needed to improve the quality of life for these individuals and their families.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 put health care institutions around the country on high alert, with special emphasis placed on those Americans deemed to be most vulnerable or with pre-existing conditions. But what happens when your entire hospital is filled with patients who fit that criteria? has been proven to stimulate the formation of certain brain chemicals, so much so that Johns Hopkins University recently called music “medicine for your mind” and said that “there are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does.”

No pregnant woman expects her baby to wind up in the intensive care unit (NICU), but every year 10% to 15% of babies born in the United States (some 500,000) do so for reasons including prematurity, heart problems, birth defects, breathing irregularities, intrauterine exposure to drugs or alcohol and infections, among others. has been proven to stimulate the formation of certain brain chemicals, so much so that Johns Hopkins University recently called music “medicine for your mind” and said that “there are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does.”

Totally Kids Rehabilitation Hospital announced that it has received all regulatory approvals to expand its license and now provide early intervention care and therapy services for infants and young children—ages birth to 3 years—with complex physical rehabilitation needs. As a result, the hospital now has the capacity to serve patients with these needs, from birth to age 21.

The link between music and emotion has been an accepted truth for thousands of years, dating as far back as Plato in ancient Greece who wrote about the power of music to arouse different sensations. More contemporary – and with the benefit of modern science as a tool – music has been proven to stimulate the formation of certain brain chemicals, so much so that Johns Hopkins University recently called music “medicine for your mind” and said that “there are few things that stimulate the brain the way music does.”

The term virtual reality has meant different things to different people over the past 80 years. To fans of science fiction in the 1930s, it meant an alternative existence. In the 1950s it was considered “experimental theatre,” and in the 1970s it was embraced by the initial wave of computer geeks. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that America saw the first widespread commercial release of virtual reality-equipped consumer headsets as a game with endless possibilities.

Few non-physicians have impacted the field of pediatric rehabilitation as profoundly as has Doug Padgett, chief executive officer and co-owner of Totally Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Southern California. As one of the nation’s pioneers in providing personalized habitation and rehabilitation services for children with developmental needs, Totally Kids today stands as a model for what it takes to inspire medically fragile children to attain their greatest potential and highest possible level of independence – physically, mentally and socially.

Children deserve the chance to be children – to go to school, to play with others, and to enjoy all of the wonderment that comes with youth. But that wonderment often turns into parents wondering where the system has failed them as they look to find the proper resources should their child be in need of acute physical rehabilitation.