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Healthy Life: Camp for Spinal Cord Patients
BACKGROUND: About 12,000 people suffer spinal cord injuries (SCI) in the United States very year, according to the Foundation for Spinal Cord Injury Prevention, Care & Cure. Many of the approximately 259,000 people who have suffered an SCI are living with permanent nerve damage, often leaving them unable to use their arms, legs or neither. While advances in emergency care is allowing more SCI patients to survive, techniques for restoring function are limited. However, treatments involving electrical stimulation devices have been shown to restore some hand movement, and electrode implants can help control bladder and bowel function. Although still under investigation, treadmill-assisted walking may improve mobility in SCI patients. Experts say it helps reactivate the "central pattern generator" in the spinal cord, which controls rhythmic locomotion patterns like walking or running (Source: American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation).
RE-TRAINING THE NERVOUS SYSTEM? A program called Step It Up Recovery Center enrolls victims of spinal cord injuries in hopes of "rerouting" the nervous system through physical stimulation. Its creators say it may help clients eventually learn to walk again. "We’re trying to reconnect the nervous system through the level of injury they have, and we believe we can reroute it and connect it again to walking," Malerie Murphy, a certified spinal cord injury recovery specialist at the program's Sanford, Fla., location, told Ivanhoe. Therapists engage clients in table exercises, assist them in standing with their knees locked, and work with them on stationary bikes. Step It Up Recovery Center has five facilities across the United States and more than 1.2 million clients. Fees required to use the facilities are $100 per hour or $250 for three hours. Clients undergo therapy three to four times a week. THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY WEIGHS IN: Traditionally, experts believed nerve cells didn't possess the ability to regenerate and rewire. That thinking is changing. "We now know that contrary to what we used to think … nerve cells do grow," Garrett Riggs, M.D., assistant professor of neurology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, told Ivanhoe. "The problem is getting them to grow from the right spot and make the right connections. Whether or not physical therapy alone can lead to such changes is still under a considerable amount of doubt in the medical community. "The research is promising, but it’s far from conclusive," Dr. Riggs said. "We don’t really see clear evidence in humans of regeneration based on intensive therapy, but it’s something that certainly merits further investigation." "I think the ultimate solution is going to be multi-modal," Dr. Riggs explained. "It’s going to be physical therapy, molecular, perhaps genetic. For now, what we really need in this area are some clinical trials where you take patients and enroll them in traditional therapy and compare them to the more intensive regimen and try to get homogenous groups that can be compared." FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Liza Riedel Step It Up Recovery Center liza@stepituprecovery.org Most Popular >>More Good Stuff |
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