Word: spinal
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...have long been reluctant to criticize Christopher Reeve. It is not easy attacking someone who suffered such a devastating injury and has carried on with spirit. Nor am I particularly keen to violate the Brotherhood of the Extremely Unlucky. (I injured my spinal cord when I was 22 and have been in a wheelchair ever since...
...raise consciousness, he says. Convinced that a cure is imminent, he wants to share the good news with the largest possible audience. For 28 years I've been hearing that a cure is just a few years away. Being a doctor, I have discounted such nonsense. Most of the spinal-cord injured, however, are not doctors...
These are the facts. Yes, there is research into spinal-cord regeneration and, occasionally, there are some positive results in animal models. But the research is preliminary, at best suggestive. There remain enormous scientific obstacles even beyond the extremely problematic question of getting the neurons to regrow. Yes, this research will bear fruit one day. Unhappily, it is overwhelmingly likely that this day lies many years in the future...
Second, when that time does come, the principal beneficiaries will be the newly injured. People long injured--who've developed scar tissue at the site of the break and whose distal spinal cord (the part below the injury) often turns to mush as the old neurons die--will be the last people to be helped by this research, if they'll be helped at all. The "cure" will probably end up like the polio vaccine: preventing paralysis, not abolishing...
Those who contract the disease initially experience flu-like symptoms. The disease progresses extremely rapidly, though, and life-threatening symptoms--such as inflammation of the brain and the spinal cord--can appear within a matter of hours...