Medical miracle for paralysis victims didn’t rely on drugs

Last week, a medical miracle was reported. And it didn’t involve dangerous doses of toxic drugs, or any drugs at all!

It’s a discovery that offers more than a million paralyzed Americans hope of getting use of their limbs back.

That by itself would be wonderful news. But the way it was done makes it even more “sensational.”

To restore feeling, movement and control to the legs of four paralysis victims, researchers used not drugs, but an old-fashioned electrical current.

Here’s how it works:

Turning on a device embedded under the skin sends electricity to blocked spinal cord nerves. This seems to allow impulses between the brain and legs to be “dialed up,” returning sensation to the lower part of the body.

The results of this experiment, done at two universities, were called “really staggering” by the head of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which helped fund it.

And they show that the best solutions to some of our worst problems may lie in things that don’t rely on Big Pharma.

Sources:

“Stimulation restores some function for 4 paralyzed men” Karen Weintraub, April 8, 2014, USA Today, usatoday.com