We are excited to have as our co-hosts for the "The 1st Annual Movement Therapy™ Awards", 2x Mr. Universe, Actor & Author Lou Ferrigno and Los Angeles Philanthropist Arthur M. Kassel. Celebrities that have already confirmed to be presenters at the event are: Robert Davi, best known for his depiction as FBI Profiler Bailey Malone in "Profiler" and as James Bond villain Franz Sanchez in "License to Kill"; and legendary multi nominated and Academy Award winning actor Jon Voight. We are also delighted to announce a special guest appearance to Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and celebrated comedian Norm Crosby.

Receiving awards this year are:

SPECIAL AWARD FOR ADVOCACY IN THE PERFORMING ARTS:

Richard Kiel, best known for his portrayal of steel toothed henchman "Jaws" in James Bond "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Moonraker" for his positive portrayal of the mobility challenged in film

MOVEMENT THERAPY ADVOCATE AWARD:

Madonna Long, known as the girl on Capital Hill. Madonna is a total advocate to helping people with disabilities be heard.

MEDICAL PRACTITIONER AWARD:

Dr. Suzy Kim, Director of Clinical Spinal Injury Program at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center for her determination to find new treatments for spinal cord injury.

INTERNATIONAL OUTREACH AWARD:

Dr. Alexander Gershman, MD, Ph.D.. President American Russian Medical Association for his dedication to disease prevention and informing Russian Physicians of the techniques and benefits of Movement Therapy

NATIONAL PUBLIC AWARENESS AWARD

Abilities Expo for continuing a platform and venue for people with disabilities to discover great products and services to enrich their lives

TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT AWARD:

SonoCine for developing the life-saving SonoCine machine that revolutionizes breast cancer imaging by visually simulating motion, using Movement as a diagnostic tool.

INNOVATIVE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

PMTD, a division of Flexiciser for developing innovative Movement Therapy Devices designed to provide Movement Therapy for mobility challenged users

TICHI WILKERSON KASSEL LEGACY AWARD:

Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, MD. ,Director of the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer's Disease Research for his research and leadership contributions in the field of Alzheimer's Disease We will update presenter and event information so please revisit our website www.movementtherapy.com often.

The Movement Therapy™ Foundation is also excited to announce that it will be an exhibitor and participant at the 2010 Abilities Expo to be held April 9, 10, & 11 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. We look forward to seeing you at our Movement Therapy™ booth.

Anyone interested in learning more about sponsorships, donating silent auction items or gift items for goody bags for "The 1st Annual Movement Therapy™ Awards", contact Robbie Motter Interim Executive Director for more information at 888-244-4420. We welcome all inquiries.

The Movement Therapy™ Foundation will soon have the first edition of the on-line newsletter available for reading on our website, and we look forward later in the year to the publication of the premiere issue of Movement Therapy™ Magazine.

 The Tichi Wilkerson Kassel Movement Therapy™ Foundation is a nonprofit 501 C3 foundation that was founded on August 1, 2009 with a generous grant from the Tichi Wilkerson Kassel Parkinson's Foundation . The web address is www.movementtherapyfoundation.org

The Mission of the Foundation is:

To educate communities about Movement Therapy™ through education, training, demonstrations, workshops and programming in mass-media markets.

                                  The Vision of the Foundation is:        

To educate able-bodied and mobility challenged individuals about the essential and transformative elements of Movement Therapy™.

To educate the medical and scientific communities so that Movement Therapy™ is one of the primary agents for health.

To ensure that Movement Therapy™ is a primary component of enhanced positive patient outcomes.

“We are honored to have Arthur M Kassel as our Board of Director Chairman/CEO” says Bryan S.J. Mallindine, Chair of the Advisory Board. 

Serving as Chairman of the Advisory Committee, Bryan  S.J. Mallindine, an accomplished management professional and business leader, strongly advocates and promotes the Law of Movement Therapy™ for the health and well-being of mobility-challenged individuals.  “ll the advisory board members bring great knowledge and expertise to the committee” says Mr. Mallindine.

Others serving on the Advisory committee are:

June Davidson, who is a non-profit advocate and is a member of the Board of Regents of the National Heritage Foundation in Washington D.C. as well as being actively involved with many non profit organizations,

John DePrima, Advocate, New York & New Jersey.  John is active with many foundations and non-profit agencies in the New York, New Jersey areas, including most of the Police Leagues.

Ruthee Goldkorn, Disability Advocate.  Ruthee works with passion as a Consultant and Advocate for persons with disabilities. She also serves as Executive Director of the Ms Wheelchair Ca organization.

Dr. Cherylyn Lee, Health Advocate. and an accomplished Holistic Health Practitioner for more than 23 years in the community. She serves as a strong Health Advocate for the Movement Therapy Foundation.

Madonna Long, Congressional Advocate & Chief Advocate for Flexiciser™Inc. Known  as the “girl on the hill:, Madonna Long is a consumer advocate who works hard to promote health mobility. She is at present the spokesperson for Pride Mobility and the editor of Chloe Magazine.

Susan Rotchy, Activist for People with Disabilities.  Susan Rotchy, Ms Wheelchair Ca 2007, was paralyzed from an accident 11 years ago. Since her accident, Susan has become an activist on behalf of people with disabilities.

Serving as Interim Executive Director is Robbie Motter.  Robbie brings along a wealth of experience and training in the non profit arena for over 18 years. Her business experiences include a long Corporate background for top companies in New York and Washington DC.

More detail on all the board members can be found by going to this link http://www.movementtherapyfoundation.org/browse-15613/Board-Pics-And-Bios.html

The Movement Therapy Foundation is currently working with Hollywood Events for their 1^st Annual Movement Therapy Gala and Awards that will be held April 8^th at the Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles, CA.The co-hosts for the event will be Lou Ferrigno and Arthur M Kassel, other celebrities that have already have confirmed to be celebrity presenters are: Robert Davi from the Closer, Richard Kiel-Jaws from James Bond, and Jon Voight. Additional celebrities will soon be confirmed.  Movement Therapy Foundation  will also have a booth at this years Abilities Expo to be held April 9, 10, 11 at the LA Convention Center.

We welcome sponsorships, silent auction items and items for goody bags for this gala event, contact Robbie Motter Interim Executive Director for more information at 888-244-4420.

The Movement Therapy™ Foundation soon will have their first edition of the on-line newsletter on their website, and are looking forward later in the year of publishing the Movement Therapy Magazine.

A video on What is Movement  Therapy? Can be seen on U Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKnUKIVCDRc

“The Movement Therapy Foundation  team is very excited about reaching out globally to spread the word about how important Movement Therapy is for Health.. We also welcome articles from others on Movement Therapy as its our goal to share valuable information on health” says Bryan S.J. Mallindine..

For more information on the Movement Therapy Foundation, call 888-244-4420, www.movementtherapyfoundation.org .

Long before I got old, I got unhealthy - around age 50, I woke up one Tuesday afternoon with an excruciating pain around my midsection and in the span of ninety minutes, went from walking around like the next jerk to spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair. On that day in 1996, I thought of myself as supremely healthy - I ran almost every day and was training to run the opening 5-K race at the upcoming LA Marathon. I had stopped smoking years before and only drank to excess on occasion. I still ate my share of chili dogs and chili fries and anything else you could put chili on, but I hadn't spent a day in the hospital since I was sixteen and my appendix burst, ruining a perfectly mediocre high school football career. In any case, my love of running aside, I never thought much about my health and certainly didn't consider it "everything."

As I adjusted to a whole new existence as a T-10 paralytic, this blithe disregard for my physical condition proved to be more than unhealthy - it almost killed me. As a freelance TV writer in Hollywood, I knew I had to get back to work immediately or I'd be forgotten in a fortnight. As soon as I could escape the rehab ward, I was right back to my old routine of pushing myself to finish one job and land the next with no concern about the wear and tear on my body. After a weekend trip to Las Vegas to write material for the comedian, Sinbad, I passed out in the car. I thought I was just tired. It turned out that I was dying from a massive pulmonary embolism, i.e., blood clots in my lungs that doubled the size of my right atrium and reduced my breathing to about 35% of capacity. As one cardiologist in the ICU put it, "You were one or two clots away from eating it."

But even that scary episode didn't turn my head around about my health. I kept getting skin breakage that turned into ulcers that turned into many late-night trips to the ER and surgeries to rid me of deadly infections like "necrotizing fasciitis," otherwise known as flesh-eating bacteria. On top of that, I was constantly fatigued. And constantly depressed. I assumed it was all par for the paralyzed course. No one, unfortunately, bothered to tell me that I had an enormous amount of control over these matters. No one told me that my paralysis was just that - a unique, isolated impairment - and all the other problems I was encountering were simply due to the fact that I was a baboon when it came to managing my own health.

It took me a good six or seven years to figure this out for myself. Six or seven years of self-induced pain and misery, of worry and consternation, both for myself and my wife. Finally, slowly, gradually, it began to dawn on me that the paralysis really had nothing to do with the problem wounds, the fatigue, the headaches, the UTI's, the dark moods, or all the other ailments I attributed to it. This was like an alcoholic blaming his drinking on a bad boss or a crabby mother in law. I certainly wasn't responsible for the paralysis - it was random and mysterious - but that didn't absolve me of the responsibility of taking care of myself after the paralysis. And the more I took care of myself, the better I felt, the fewer trips I made to the hospital, and the more the paralysis receded as a factor in my definition of myself.

That last point is the real key - if you allow yourself to remain unhealthy in the wake of a devastating disability like paralysis, you are only giving that disability more importance in your life than it deserves. You're letting it define you and that's probably the unhealthiest thing you could allow to happen.

Without going into detail, my own regimen involved two basic features: no bread products - toast, hamburger buns, pizza dough, and all of their gluten brethren; and two, daily therapeutic movement. What I love about my main instrument of torture, I mean, therapy - the Flexiciser - is that it provides movement to every part of my body. Without it, the lower half of my body would never move, which can't be healthy on muscles, joints, circulation, and the like. Plus, my waist would never move and most likely, fat would build up there, no matter how strong my upper torso or how many pizzas I didn't consume.

Now, at 64, tooling around in a wheelchair but as thin and fit as I was in my twenties, I've come to honor those wise words of my Swedish father in law: if you have your health, and focus on remaining healthy, you do have just about everything. You certainly have the best "cure" for paralysis they've yet to come up with.

Allen Rucker

I started using a standing frame not long after my accident but felt too confined and I was eager to have more movement. The standing frame does serve a great purpose in strengthening my bones but I knew that my muscles, tendons and ligaments were crying out for some attention. Enter the Flexiciser!

Within a week of using my Flexiciser I began to notice that my legs were looser and tightened up less and less from being in my wheelchair throughout the day. The manipulated movement of my legs from using the Flexiciser produced such positive results as time progressed. Such as, better blood circulation and muscle definition. I learned very early into my injury that if you don't use it, you'll lose it. Therefore, it is important to maintain a regular routine of movement therapy.

Quite often I am approached and asked the question "Are you 'really' in a wheelchair?" I was unaware that there is a stereotype of what the average wheelchair user looks like. I know that not only my abilities but also my appearance and the way I carry myself stem from movement therapy. I find the more active I am the more life I get to live. And what a great life it is!"

Briana Walker

Sincerely,

Madonna Long
T-5 paraplegic, Movement Therapy Consumer Advocate

I am excited to see this Tichi Wilkerson Kassel Movement Therapy™ Foundation whose mission is getting people educated on how important Movement Therapy is for the body and one's health.

I have many success stories I can share concerning how movement has changed lives, especially in Alzheimer patients which is one of the areas Dr. Bresky is an expert in and who outlines movement as one of the strategies that seniors must use.

Congratulations on getting the word out to the world and especially to the medical communities on how important Movement Therapy is."

June Davidson, Author, Keynote speaker and President of American Seminar Leaders and Coaching Firm International

Movement Therapy is the next phase in the evolution of rehabilitation care and treatment of person's with catastrophic disAbility whether from trauma, illness, or development. Mentally and emotionally, Movement Therapy provides a source of stimulation and exertion to establish a realm of normalcy in an otherwise so called abnormal state of physical being.

The Tichi Wilkerson Kassel Movement Therapy™ Foundation provides all of the required resources for rehabilitation professionals to realize the full potential of their patient and emphasizes the positive affect that movement, aided or unaided, as an essential component to comprehensive rehabilitation to enhance the quality of life and the potential for a better quantity of life expectancy of the disAbility community."

Ruthee Goldkorn
Advocate & Movement Therapy Advisory Board Member