Word: disks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lower back pain, as prevalent as the common cold, is the price human beings pay for walking upright. In most cases, simple treatments like bed rest, exercise and pain-killers bring relief. But many sufferers are not so lucky. If one or more of their spinal disks -- pulpy masses that cushion pairs of vertebrae -- rupture and press on nerve roots, the pain that radiates from the back and down the legs can be excruciating and disabling. For many the only treatment is surgical removal of part of the blown disk, a major operation called a laminectomy that requires general anesthesia...
...there is a new and far less traumatic option for some disk patients. Known as percutaneous automated diskectomy, it is an outpatient procedure performed under local anesthesia through a tiny (2 mm long) incision in the back. Developed by Radiologist Gary Onik and Neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon of Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, the operation breezed through its clinical trials, and has been performed on some 15,000 patients around the country -- at approximately one-third the cost of conventional surgery...
...relatively simple operation is similar to arthroscopic surgery, in which damaged tissue is removed, typically from knee joints, through a hollow tube. In the diskectomy technique, a stainless-steel tube, guided by X ray, is slipped into the incision until the tip of the instrument rests against the disk. Next the surgeon threads a combination cutting-suction device the diameter of a pencil lead down the cannula, pushes it gently into the center of the disk and steps on a floor pedal. Suction draws disk material, which has the texture of crab meat, into a porthole near the probe...
...Preston Tucker proclaimed it "The car of tomorrow -- today!" The Tucker seated six adults and could cruise at 100 m.p.h. with its air-cooled rear engine. It boasted innovations that later became Detroit standards: disk brakes, a padded dashboard and curiosities such as a pop-out windshield and a crash compartment. (Preston's idea for seat belts was nixed by his company's board.) Sticker price...
...purity of an athlete's commitment does not guarantee success. For two years Tim Daggett, whose perfect 10 clinched the U.S. team's gold in Los Angeles, has bulled his way through the agony of injury. He has faced ankle surgery, a ruptured disk and nerve problems in his left arm. The worst came ten months ago after a vault at the World Championships in Rotterdam. When he landed disproportionately on his left leg, two bones simply snapped, severing an artery. His leg saved by an emergency operation, Daggett refused to stop: "I don't want to look back...