Word: spastics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Since last winter when young (33), heavy-set Dr. Kabat began treating such spastic cases, as a Saturday afternoon sideline in his front parlor, his clinic has grown until it now takes all his time. His eight therapists and 50 patients have crowded his wife and three children right out of the house...
...Kabat is convinced that most spastics can be helped (although curing them is impossible). He first got on the track of spastic therapy when he worked with Sister Elizabeth Kenny (see below) at the University of Minnesota in 1942. Kabat, a boy wonder who got his Ph.D. from Northwestern at 22, was then an instructor in physiology. He discovered that prostigmine, which had been used chiefly to relieve post-operational gas pains, relieved muscular and nervous tension in polio victims, helped physical therapy to create new habit patterns...
Prostigmine & Education. The aim of spastic therapy, Dr. Kabat explains, is to gain "voluntary control of muscles through a part of the brain which hasn't been injured." This is a difficult, slow process, because "it is trying to make the uninjured part of the brain learn to do something it wasn't planned to do." Prostigmine makes it easier by: 1) increasing the amount of acetylcholine, a body chemical which stimulates nervous and mental activity; 2) relaxing and strengthening the muscles...
...Indian arrow poison curare (rhymes with safari) is sometimes used in abdominal surgery and in spastic paralysis, to relax taut muscles. But doctors have not generally liked it much, because an overdose will kill a patient...
...fourth source of irritation has resulted from her recently acquired interest in spastic paralysis, a disease in which damaged nerves cause uncoordinated movements. When she took four such cases into the Kenny Institute for treatment, local doctors had them removed. Sister Kenny soon resigned from the Institute. The Institute's board of directors refused to accept Sister Kenny's resignation and the Institute promised to do "everything hu manly possible" to further the research she wants...