An introduction to benesh movement notation and its relevance to physiotherapy

During the last few years attention has been concentrated on the analysis of movement in patients with disorders of the central nervous system. The phenomenon of movement has been looked at not as the operation of a mechanism made up of individual parts, but as the result of the integration of motor patterns in the central nervous system. The traditional neurological examination is inadequate for the assessment of movement patterns and as a result a specific method called "motoscopic" examination has been developed for this purpose. This has been described elsewhere (Milani Comparetti and Gidoni, 1967) and consists of the systematic visual observation of: (a) spontaneous posture and motor behaviour, (b) the performance of a series of movements as requested by the examiner (c) patterns of movement under certain stimulus conditions.