OPINION
Christopher Reeve is pictured with his wife Dana Reeve (Image: Getty)
Injuries don’t come much more catastrophic than a broken back or neck. Because once the spinal cord is severed… that’s it. Nothing below the rupture will ever regain feeling or the power to move again. People who have been thrown from horseback and landed on their heads report an instant loss of sensation below the point where the spine has snapped. There’s no transition of any kind. Calamity is immediate and irreversible. Or it was.
This week came news of what is close to a miracle for those who have been left paralysed after accidents while diving, riding, playing sport, even simply tripping on the stairs. Because of current world events it hasn’t received the kind of coverage it might have done in less troubled times, so I thought I’d tell you about it here. One person loudly hailing the breakthrough was Matthew Reeve, son of Superman star Christopher Reeve, above. Matthew’s father was of course paralysed after being thrown from a horse during a riding competition in Culpeper, Virginia.
The actor – an icon for physical perfection – was confined to a wheelchair and ventilator for the rest of his life. The irony of his fate was beyond cruel.
But, were Reeve alive today, there would be hope he could scarcely have dreamt of. Matthew says his father would have been “thrilled” with the results of experiments in spinal cord stimulation on people like him. The pioneering technology has been years in development and is described as “a hearing aid for the nervous system”.
It works by using the skin to deliver electrical impulses to the dormant spinal cord below the patient’s injury. All 10 participants in the UK have made significant improvements – including one woman who described how “everybody cried” as she amazinglytook her first steps since being paralysed from the waist down.
Others in the trial report feeling sensations of heat and cold, and signals from the stomach and bladder, for the first time since their accident. Matthew says that, quite simply, the treatment is “a game-changer. Treating paralysis is no longer impossible or an improbable goal.”
I just thought that in such a difficult week, you’d appreciate a bit of sheer, unalloyed good news.