Starts visit one
Pain
Protect the limb first.
Positioning, hands-on work to calm tone, and custom splints fabricated and remolded here in the clinic, so joints stay open instead of quietly setting.
What We Treat
Spinal cord injury treatment in Vancouver, WA.
Independence gets measured in small things: a zipper, a phone, a fork, a door handle. You work every one of them one-on-one with a licensed Occupational Therapist, several board-certified in hand therapy (CHT), every visit.
Sound Familiar?
Is this what the day looks like now?
- A zipper, a button, a clasp, and no good way through any of them
- The phone slides out of your hand and there is no getting it back
- Somebody else opens every jar, every bottle and every door
- Shoulders and wrists that ache from doing work your hands used to do
- Fingers curling into a position that is getting harder to open
- You stopped asking about your hands, because nobody had an answer
Two or more? Keep reading.
Why It Happens
The injury is in the cord. The day gets decided at the hands.
The spinal cord carries the signal between the brain and everything below the level of injury. When part of that pathway is damaged, some muscles lose the message completely, some get a weaker version of it, and some are untouched. Which ones depends on the level and how complete the injury is. No two people land in the same place.
The arms and hands are where that plays out hour by hour. Weak muscles get overloaded. Joints that go unused tighten. The shoulders quietly absorb work they were never built for. A cause-first evaluation maps what still fires, what can be trained, what needs a splint, and what is better solved by changing how the task is done. Those are four different answers.
The Honest Truth
Joints do not wait politely.
If you keep waiting
- Fingers and wrists set into positions that get harder to open the longer they sit
- Shoulders and elbows absorb the overload, and start hurting on their own account
- Tasks get handed off to somebody else permanently, one small one at a time
If you start this week
- You leave visit one knowing what still fires and what can be trained
- Positioning and custom splinting start protecting the hands right away
- You get a plan with an endpoint, built around the tasks you named out loud
Nobody regrets starting too early. Independence is far easier to protect than it is to rebuild.
How We Treat It
The same four phases. Built around your hands.
Every plan has an endpoint. Here is what the four phases look like after a spinal cord injury.
Once we have a baseline
Prime
Find what still fires.
Careful testing of what is there, then training it. Our therapists are Saebo Certified, which matters when a hand will not open on its own yet.
Once the basics hold
Perform
Turn function into tasks.
Grip, pinch, reach and transfers get built into the real thing: the phone, the fork, the zipper, the door, the work you actually want back.
Reviewed as you go
Prevent
Protect what you built.
Shoulder and wrist load gets shared instead of dumped, splints get checked and remolded as things change, and you leave with a routine that holds. That is the endpoint.
They’re amazing!!! The one on one treatment and attention to detail is superb. They care about you and you feel it every time you walk in the door.
Shared by Dominic G. · Google review
What people arrive with: hands left out of the plan, and every jar handed to somebody else
What happens here: what still fires gets found, trained, splinted and put back into the day
Spinal cord injuries
Splints made in clinic
Questions, Answered
What people ask before booking for a spinal cord injury.
That deserves an evaluation and an honest answer after it, not a guess over the phone. We test what still fires, what can be trained, and what is better solved by a custom splint or by changing how the task is done. Splints are fabricated and remolded here in the clinic. Sometimes the win is strength. Sometimes it is a different way to hold a fork. Both count.
We are an insurance-based clinic, and the full payer list lives on our insurance page. It includes Medicare, Regence BCBS, Providence, TriWest, Tricare, auto insurance and workers compensation plans, among many others. We check your benefits before your first visit and tell you exactly what we find. You will get facts about your coverage, not a hopeful guess.
You get a plan with an endpoint, built around tasks you name rather than an open tab of appointments. Your therapist maps the four phases, Pain, Prime, Perform and Prevent, and says what each phase has to accomplish before the next one starts. You will always know which phase you are in and what is left to do.
Book Your Visit
Ready when you are.
Request a time and a real person from our front desk calls you back to get you scheduled. No phone tree. No ‘someone will reach out.’ Just a plan.
- Hours Mon–Fri 7:00am–5:00pm · Sat–Sun closed
- (360) 989-1200 Prefer to talk now? Call us.
- One-on-one with a licensed Occupational Therapist, every visit
5.0 · 146 Google reviews
Your request goes straight to our front desk
Step 1 of 5
Request sent.
That’s the hard part done. We’ll call during clinic hours to get you on the schedule and tell you what to bring.
Visit Us
Care this good, this close.
Gabbert Clinic
- 7710 NE Greenwood Dr # 150, Vancouver, WA 98662
- (360) 989-1200
- Fax: (360) 583-3442
- admin@gabbertclinic.com
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Mon–Fri 7:00am–5:00pm
Sat–Sun closed