Expo showcases brain centre’s connections
“It’s a sunny Saturday morning and the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre is buzzing with activity. Hundreds of people – many of them with wheelchairs, prosthetics, carers or guide dogs – are filing into the sprawling exhibition hall.
Inside are all manner of colourful exhibits and stalls offering an array of products and services aimed at helping make the lives of the disabled, their carers and loved ones just that little bit easier. The occasion is the Brisbane Disability Connection Expo, an annual event put on by Developing Australian Communities to connect NDIS providers and scheme participants. Thousands of people have registered to attend the two-day exhibition, where some 300 exhibitors are showing their wares to an enthusiastic crowd. Among them is Brain Care, a Tweed/Gold Coast-based NDIS-registered provider of neuromodulation services to optimise brain functioning.
Its highly interactive stand was one of the most popular at the expo, with large queues of people forming to try Brain Care’s innovative neurofeedback therapy and discuss other treatments to assist with a wide range of psychological and neurological issues including brain injury, autism, ADHD, trauma, depression and anxiety.
Among those trying the therapy live at the expo was Brisbane man Ryan Stokes, who suffered a serious brain injury when he was bashed by a group of men outside a hotel in 1993 when he was 19.
“I was in hospital for six months, including six weeks in a coma in ICU,” he says. “I had to relearn how to walk and talk again. It was a near-death experience and it’s been a long road back. You have a head injury and you’re left thinking ‘where do I go? I have to start my life again’.”
Ryan said he was visiting the expo for the first time to look for acquired brain injury-specific treatments and therapies that might help him further, such as those offered by Brain Care.”
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This post was originally published in July 2022.