Why Spinal Injuries (Even Minor Ones) Are Next To Impossible To Completely Fix.

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Why Spinal Injuries (Even Minor Ones) Are Next To Impossible To Completely Fix.

In: Biology

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The spinal cord is communication channel with a lot of electric wires (e.g., electric signals transferred from one cell to the next). Now if you cut all the wires, and put them together by chance, probably most wires will be connected wrongly (e.g., nerve sprouting grows the nerves together wrongly).

Now spinal cord injures are fixable by computers. You attached a computer to the nerves and muscles and so overcome the injured signal path. This kind of operation is expensive and therefore is not done often. However, it is possible to walk again or drive a car with you hands/arms. The reason is that such injures are low compared to other human conditions, therefore the pharma companies have no economic interest.

In the future, this will be solvable and mass producible and the technology will constantly improve.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Did no one watch that episode of Louie?

“It’ll take another….20,000 years to get straight up. Until then, it’s gonna keep hurting.”

Anonymous 0 Comments

Does this apply to spinal surgeries as well? Like cutting through bone to remove a tumor?

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are these special cells called astroglia that fill any holes in your central nervous system to keep toxins out. The cut nerve cells would probably like to regrow, but the cut gets packed with astroglia and they can’t grow.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because we can’t get over our religious moral BS and just allow stem cell treatment. Even when we no longer have to obtain stem cells from ethically questionable sources.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’d be surprised how delicate the spinal column is. Or rather, how particular it’s integrity is. Seemingly minor damage can have detrimental long term effects, because even if the integrity of something like 1 disk or 1 vertebrae is slightly compromised, it throws everything off, and there’s no real fixing it, because if you try to reinforce a problem, it messes up the distribution of force and causes cascading damage downstream.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’ve broken my back twice. T3/T4 the first go around. 18 months later, L4, L5 (and pelvis). (Skydiving can take a toll). I didn’t even know I had broken T3 and 4 until I had my second mishap. The doctors looking at my MRI for my lower back injury asked when I broke my upper back. Surprise. Surprise.

Anyway, I got to meet some smart people along the way. It’s where I learned that a significant number of people who end up paralyzed don’t actually sever their spinal chords. A compression fracture of a vertebra (like what I did to my T3&4) can result in swelling around the spinal chord. The swelling can cut off blood flow resulting in nerve death and subsequent permanent paralysis. I was very fortunate that didn’t happen to me. (My T3/4 injury was caused by an extremely hard opening parachute. The second injury was an off-field landing resulting in a 30’ fall).

The lesson to take away is: if you’ve suffered a traumatic injury to your back, see a doctor! A simple steroid injection can mean the difference between being sore for a few weeks or never feeling anything again!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Some of them really aren’t that impossible to fix. Depends on what spinal injury you are talking about, the location, and the severity.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Medical Student: Dr. Frankenstein?

Dr. Frankenstein: My name is “Fronkenshteen.”

Medical Student: Dr. “Fronkenschteen” isn’t it true that Darwin preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case until, by some extrordinary means, it actually began to move with voluntary motion?

Dr. Frankenstein: Are you speaking of the worm or the spaghetti?

[the class laughs]

Medical Student: Why, the worm, sir.

Dr. Frankenstein: Yes, I did read something of that incident when I was a student, but you have to remember that a worm… with very few exceptions… is not a human being.

Medical Student: But wasn’t that the whole basis of your grandfather’s work? The reanimation of dead tissue?

Dr. Frankenstein: My grandfather was a very sick man.

Medical Student: But as a “Fronkenshteen” aren’t you the least bit curious? Doesn’t the bringing to life what was once dead hold any interest for you?

Dr. Frankestein: You are talking about the non-sensical ravings of a lunatic mind; dead is dead!
Student: But look at what has been done with hearts and kidneys…

Dr. Frankenstein: [starting to shout] Hearts and kidneys are TINKER-TOYS!! I’m talking about the central nervous system!!

Student: But, sir…

Dr. Frankenstein: I am a scientist, not a philosopher! [picks up a scalpel] You have a better chance of re-animating this SCALPEL then you would of mending broken nervous tissue!

Student: But what about your grandfather’s work?

Dr. Frankenstein: MY GRANDFATHER’S WORK WAS DOO-DOO!!! I am not interested in death! The only thing that concerns me IS THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE!!!

[in his anger, Dr. Frankenstein stabs himself in the leg with the scalpel, grimaces, then crosses his legs]

Dr. Frankenstein: Class…is…dismissed!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Just my personal story for anyone here who might have back pain. I hurt my back lifting weights at the gym some 12 years ago. I was in pain for a month until my uncle told me to go his chiropractor. After a single session he had diagnosed me and fixed the pain. I had pulled a disc out place in the middle of my back. He popped it back into place after giving me ab electro heat massage. Best money I have ever spent.