Common treatments for paralysis, including but not limited to surgeries such as lumbar decompression surgery, tend to be extremely risky.
According to the UK’s National Health Service, the purpose of lumbar decompression surgery is to relieve pain and numbness in the leg, but it is not always entirely effective and can result in infection, blood clots, dural tear and leakage of cerebrospinal fluid, temporary or permanent blindness, or nerve injury and further paralysis. In fact, it is statistically more probable for a person to lose more than gain from reverse paralysis surgery.
A new and far less risky treatment for paralysis called transcutaneous stimulation is being credited in the partial restoration of leg function in paralyzed patients. With transcutaneous stimulation, paralyzed patients are able to regain voluntary movement of their legs without surgery. With this non-invasive technique, a total of five patients who were previously completely paralyzed in their lower body have regained the use of their legs after weeks of electrical stimulation trials.
As reported by the National Institutes of Health, which, according to the Washington Post, assisted in funding the study, the new technique “delivers electrical current to the spinal cord by way of electrodes strategically placed on the skin of the lower back [which] expands to nine the number of completely paralyzed individuals who have achieved voluntary movement while receiving spinal stimulation, though this is the first time the stimulation was delivered non-invasively.” Come the study’s conclusion, the men were reportedly “able to move their legs with no stimulation at all.”
According to Dr. Roderic Pettigrew, the director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health, as reported by CBS News, “These encouraging results provide continued evidence that spinal cord injury may no longer mean a life-long sentence of paralysis and support the need for more research.”
These encouraging results provide continued evidence that spinal cord injury may no longer mean a life-long sentence of paralysis and support the need for more research.
