The rehabilitation of patients who suffer from pulmonary disease means the alleviation of their symptoms through comprehensive and intensive treatments combined with a variety of methods and devices and education. It also includes providing assistance to prevent complications caused by these disorders. It helps patients carry out optimal functional abilities in daily life through increasing their exercise capacity and optimize psychological stability via rehabilitation treatment. In terms of pulmonary rehabilitation, pulmonary diseases are classified into two categories -intrinsic or obstructive disease groups, and restrictive lung disease groups. Common pulmonary rehabilitation treatments focus on the former, whose main disorder is oxygenation abnormality, whereas the main disorder of the latter is ventilation disturbance. As the fundamental pathological physiology differs for the two disease groups, appropriate treatment is selected considering the characteristics of each disease. This particular chapter describes the most representative diseases of these two groups, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and neuromuscular disease.
Pulmonary rehabilitation is composed of patient training, breathing retraining, relaxation therapy, management of intra-airway secretion, reconditioning exercise, along with psychological and nutrition consultation. For patients who are in need of ventilation assistance, applying various ventilation assistance methods that can help improve their lives is also an important factor. Therefore, non-invasive assisted ventilation is heavily emphasized for pulmonary rehabilitation. This method is mainly used for long-term ventilation assistance with patients suffering from neuromuscular diseases.