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Scientists Restore Walking After Spinal Cord Injury
Spinal cord damage blocks the routes that the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. Until now, doctors believed that the only way for injured patients to walk again was to re-grow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. For the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganize itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement. The lead researcher said, "This pessimistic view [that severe injury to the spinal cord means permanent paralysis] has changed over my lifetime, and our findings add to a growing body of research showing that the nervous system can reorganize after injury."
When I was 16, I had an accident (put my hand through a glass door, the glass cut through my wrist clean to the bone taking out all the tendons as well as the median nerve, that runs roughly up the middle of the front of the wrist and supplies the thumb, finger 2 and half of finger 3 and part of the palm with sensation).
To repair all the damage, it took 7.5 hours of microsurgery. The nerve took several months to fully regrow.
When it did, the sensation came out in all the wrong places - if I touched part of one finger, the sensation would come out somewhere else, for instance on another finger or somewhere more or less random in the affected area of the hand. But within a few months, the brain had "rerouted" everything, and the sensations gradually started coming out in the right place.
To qualify for the class, the disabled students had to have just enough arm control to plug their nose, which is needed to "clear" their ears, that is, adjust the pressure inside the ear drum to the water pressure outside.
Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.
I found it quite an eye-opening experience.
One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson, who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.
I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.
I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.
Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.
Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)
That's right, it's his view. That is, it's an opinion. Nothing he says is "fact", nor is it backed up by fact, or even a convincing argument. Why does he get +5 insightful? Do I get +5 insightful in a Linux thread for saying something like:
"Linux is the absolute best operating system. It's open source, making it super awesome. Bill Gates doesn't own it, so it's even more awesome. I know a large number of geeks and am fond of many of them, and they all like Linux, therefore it cannot be anything but the absolute bestest operating system evar. I want evil corporations to keep their money grubbing hands off Linux!"
No, I do not get +5 insightful... because that is an opinion. There are no "facts" per se, and I really give nothing to back it up, except for a superficially convincing collection of personal anecdotes, which actually add nothing to the discussion at all.
He didn't add anything to any abortion argument that has ever taken place in the history of the universe, except possibly some arguments in the Bible Belt. Please mod him, and me, -1 offtopic. The end.
FWIW, you're right, the government should keep their hands off a woman's body. That's my opinion.