Castillo Morales® Association

Castillo Morales® Association

Welcome to the Homepage of the Castillo Morales® Association

The Castillo Morales® concept is named after its originator, the Argentinian rehabilitation physician Dr Rodolfo Castillo Morales®. His roots lay in the anthropology of Latin America, which Castillo Morales intensively researched and compared to his own experience in living together with the Aborigines, the original inhabitants of Latin America, and also to their habits. His ideas for simple measures, embedded in day to day life, in the therapeutic support of people with significant handicaps were derived from this experience and its comparison with rehabilitation medicine findings

Foto © S.Magin

Castillo Morales®‘s therapists, as is to be expected from an inter-professional basic understanding of the concept, come from a variety of healing professions. Physicians, physiotherapists, ergotherapists and speech therapists are instructed during a six-week basic course in the philosophy of the concept and principles – neurophysiological and anatomical but also anthropological and pedagogical.

Guided by the instructors, those participating in the course learn to provide practical help in functionally useful initial positions they set for a patient, and to apply techniques to the manual stimulation of the muscle system of the patient’s entire body, in particular to the orofacial region, so that they have a better chance of achieving the objectives set by their patients themselves. Communication is the most important aspect of this help. What wishes does the individual patient have, how would he or she like to fulfil them, and what is the best way for the specialists to achieve agreement on the best therapy?

Co-operation with a patient is based on respect and trust in his abilities. In an anamnestic dialogue and the subsequent results his strengths are determined and named before individual objectives can be set for the programme of work.

Overall Approach

Preamble

The mission of the Castillo Morales® Association is the maintenance, the ongoing development and dissemination of the Castillo Morales® concept, a holistic concept of treatment for children and adults on a neurophysiological basis.

The Castillo Morales® concept makes an important contribution to improving treatment of patients with neurological defects – patients who are the centre of our interest.

Of great importance in the Castillo Morales® concept is respect towards the person one is dealing with and trust in his individual abilities and strengths. We place particular value on supporting the patient in achieving to the highest degree possible autonomy and participation in everyday life.

For us, recognising and respecting the dignity of a person in every phase of life is of great importance, independent of his background, religion or philosophy of life.

Internal and External Communication and Co-operation

The basis of our interaction with other people is esteem, trust, candour and a constructive approach to resolving conflicts. The organs of the Castillo Morales® Association undertake to use a co-operative management style.

With respect to the Castillo Morales® concept the Castillo Morales® Association considers itself to be the appropriate organisation to speak to patients, their family members and members of the public active in this field.

The Castillo Morales® Association maintains and promotes contact both at home and abroad, with specialists or organisations and institutes working in the same field.

The Castillo Morales® Association supports its members in exchanging information on their experience in the use of the concept.

Disseminating the concept

Disseminating the Castillo Morales® concept and hence improving the treatment of patients is achieved by providing ongoing training of therapists (ergotherapists, speech therapists and physiotherapists) as well as physicians.

The Castillo Morales® Association sets and maintains quality standards for both instructions given in the Castillo Morales® concept and in training the Castillo Morales® instructional therapists.

Both for the instructional therapist teams and the participants in the courses the Association places importance on forming inter-professional groups.

In order to maintain the quality standards of the Castillo Morales® Association, the instructional therapists undertake to exchange information regularly on their experience – with each other and with the Argentinian instructional therapists – and also to undergo a continual ongoing training.