MOROYAMA, Saitama Prefecture--After Yoshiyuki Nezu suffered a cerebral infarction, he needed physical assistance from his wife for tasks including helping him up. 

Now, the 62-year-old professor is passing on those techniques that he developed to assist him, which do not require much physical strength, to others in the health care field. 

Nezu taught students on Oct. 23 at the Saitama Medical University Faculty of Medicine here.

Despite being diagnosed with stage-4 terminal cancer, Nezu, a visiting professor at the university, has continued to give lessons on his methodologies to students who will become medical doctors in the future.

“Physical assistance skills will certainly be required of them when they become doctors,” he said. “I want them to learn the methods through physical repetition to the best extent that they can.”

HANDS-ON INSTRUCTION IMPRESSES CLASS

Nezu was teaching a course to 50 freshman and sophomore students from the faculty of medicine, interspersed with physical training, mostly on changing the position of recipients on their beds and propping them up while helping them to their feet.

Everything in his methods can be done through using the middle fingers of the hands, the medicinal fingers and the thumbs alone. Easy and effortless movements, such as pulling, pushing and turning around, are sufficient to move the recipient’s body.

Nezu also demonstrated to the class how a patient can be raised to her feet from a wheelchair.

He began by closing the legs of a student playing the patient’s role. He then crossed her arms, put his palm at one point of her back and pulled her forward so she slouched.

He subsequently placed his middle fingers and medicinal fingers under her armpits and pulled them backward, and quickly, the mock patient was up on her feet.

The students oohed and aahed every time they practiced physical training under Nezu’s guidance. At one point, Nezu was seen advising a student to be gentler in assisting a patient.

“I was surprised to learn that everything was so easy to do,” one student said in a feedback report after the class was over. “I want to draw on this experience when I am a doctor.”

“I will enlist the help of my family to practice the skills when I am back home,” said another.

“I have realized how so much thought is given to how the patients can be made to feel comfortable when they are being physically assisted,” said a third.

Nezu’s much sought-after university course is taken by 50 students each in the first and second semesters. The class on Oct. 23 was the first of the second semester.

TECHNIQUES CREATED OUT OF NECESSITY

Nezu was appointed a lecturer at Saitama Medical University in 2018. He said university officials asked him to serve in the post after learning about the sensation that his physical assistance skills had created.

Nezu devised the techniques after he had a cerebral infarction at age 38, when he served as concurrent head of multiple intensive care homes for the elderly.

He had to rely on his wife for physical assistance, even though she was busy at the time raising a child despite having had an intervertebral disk herniation.

Nezu therefore came up with these easy physical assistance methods in hopes they would reduce the strain on his wife and prevent her from developing lower back pain.

Nezu, a 3-dan in Shorinji Kempo, also drew on body movements that he had acquired through practicing the martial art.

His methodologies made a great stir when he practiced them at elderly care homes after he returned to his duties. He was invited by local government officials to give lectures.

Nezu has so far devised a total of 378 variations of his techniques. Saitama Medical University has worked hard to distribute them, including by teaching them to patients being discharged from an affiliated hospital.

Nezu was diagnosed with cancer two years ago. He has undergone surgery for transplanting part of his greater pectoral muscle elsewhere, so he now has less physical strength than he previously had.

Nezu told the students in the class that his methods enable him, even in his current state, to do physical assistance.

“I am happy that these physical assistance techniques, which can contribute to community-based health care, have taken root at this university, where doctors, nurses and students are working as one,” he said. “I hope they will remain in use here for a long time.”