Word: mcdonaldization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...McDonald's opens a new store somewhere around the globe every eight hours, but these days the fast-food giant is trying to attract attention to the demolition of one of its 30,000 outposts. In a Chicago suburb just a few miles down the road from corporate headquarters, the head of McDonald's USA hired a band and had balloons strewn about before a Caterpillar backhoe clawed down the walls of one of the company's older locations. After 24 years, the Hinsdale branch, like the rest of McDonald's, looks a bit tired and frayed at the edges...
Reeve did try, and the finger moved as commanded. Two months later, he was in New Orleans addressing a symposium of neuroscientists when he met with Dr. John McDonald, a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine who was developing a therapy program for paralysis patients that he called activity-based recovery. While the paralysis community--McDonald included--believes that the road to a cure runs at least partly through the lab (see box), McDonald is convinced that a vigorous program of exercise and electrical muscle stimulation may also help awaken the nervous system. Reeve showed McDonald his finger...
...years since, Reeve and McDonald have coaxed still more from his slowly stirring nervous system. Working in McDonald's lab and with private therapists, Reeve spends at least three hours a week on an FES bicycle, receives similar muscle stimulation on parts of his upper body and spends long stretches in the pool. He can now move most of his joints underwater and has sensation on 65% to 70% of his body...
Indeed, Reeve's entire spinal-injury classification has been upgraded. The American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) ranks patients on a five-level scale from A, which is virtually no sensation or motion, to E, which is normal. "Chris was an ASIA A before," says McDonald. "He's now an ASIA...
...that happen? Until recently, accepted wisdom was that spinal tissue can never regrow, but that's being rethought. McDonald has conducted studies with spine-injured rats in which some of the animals are given no therapy after injury and others are given exercise. When their cords are later examined, the stimulated animals show new cell growth at the site of the lesion. "We believe," says McDonald, "that we can induce selective and robust cell growth...