Word: spinal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When pain becomes so severe that doctors call it "intractable," they mean that it cannot be controlled by any safe and simple dosage of drugs. Even the most severe pain can usually be alleviated by cutting the appropriate nerve fibers in the spinal cord, but this in itself is considered major surgery, and too drastic an operation for some patients. The cord-cutting procedure has an added disadvantage: when the patient recovers, he will have suffered permanent loss of feeling in the affected part of his body. Now an imaginative University of Chicago neurosurgeon has devised a way to achieve...
...Sean F. Mullan begins with a simple injection of anesthetic into the side of the neck, just below the skull-one place where the spinal cord and its multiplex nerve cables are not completely encased in bone. Then he inserts a hollow, stainless-steel needle, only one hundredth of an inch in diameter, and guides the needle toward the nerves he wants to deaden with the aid of instant X rays that an assistant hands to him every ten seconds. One group of nerve fibers in the spinal cord serves the legs, another the trunk, and a third the arms...
Although none of the spinal cord is literally cut, the effect is temporarily the same: some nerve fibers are killed, and others are so damaged by the electric current that they take months to revive. More than half of the first 250 patients treated by Dr. Mullan with his new technique have been in the final stages of cancer. For others, suffering from shingles, some forms of arthritis, and nerve damage resulting from injuries, relief has lasted an average of six months. If and when the pain returns, the operation can be repeated...
...university had tried parts of such an operation on 33 cadavers. They found that while nerves, blood vessels and other soft structures were difficult enough to cut through, the worst obstacle was an important but little-known bone, the clivus, which balances on the very top of the spinal column to form a pivot for the skull. There was only one way to get past the clivus, and that was to cut a window in it. To make this possible, a whole trayful of special instruments had to be designed and built. Those instruments were ready when the young baker...
...move it with an electric current. To upset his body's acid-alkali balance, he drank ammonium chloride and panted for days afterward. To prove that "sunstroke" (properly, heat stroke) is not caused directly by the sun's rays, but by the overheating of the brain and spinal cord, he sat in Egypt's broiling sun for two hours, periodically dousing his head and spine with water. He got no heat stroke, but he suffered a severe sunburn across his broad shoulders...