Whenever I see a post like this I am struck by the huge disparity in our grasp of (and ability to treat) different types of human ailments. Are you a tetraplegic? Don't worry, we will just literally rewire your nervous system to give you functioning limbs again. Do you have tiny tumor in your pancreas? Sorry, you won't know about it for a while, and when you do your only recourse is for a surgeon to cut out half of your digestive system and then we'll inject literal poison into your body with the hope that you die in 1 year instead of 3 months.
I know, there are plenty of reasons that certain diseases have been harder to crack, but the disparity always seems so striking. This nerve transfer study seems so incredible and futuristic, and yet there is still so far to go.
Our insurance agent had his arm in a sling a year or so ago when we went to talk to him. Routine surgery nicked a nerve and he lost control of his hand. Saw him a couple times after and sounded like it was just something he'd have to live with.
Then we bought a house and were in to talk to him about insurance for that. His hand was working fine.
Asked him about it. Apparently they took a nerve out of his leg and put it in his arm. "Can't feel my foot, but that's a heck of a lot better than not being able to use my hand"
>Are you a tetraplegic? Don't worry, we will just literally rewire your nervous system to give you functioning limbs again. Do you have tiny tumor in your pancreas?
I find it humorous that you use paralysis as the 'don't worry' disease -- it's (quite literally) one of the least treatable conditions we know of, while simultaneously being one of the oldest recorded.
I get the comparison that you're trying to create, but paralysis (more specifically paralysis caused by nerve damage) is by no means a closed case -- and virtually no one (compared to the suffering population) has access to treatment options that change quality of life by any significant means.
Aside from those qualms I mentioned, I think that comparing a quickly-fatal disease (pancreatic cancer) with a set of conditions that shortens lifespan and decreases quality of life (tetraplegia) , but is generally a maintainable condition if acute treatment is survived, is a comparison built upon weak premises.
disclosure : I have a spinal cord injury at my C5 vertebrae. In Europe i'm a tetraplegic, in the United States i'm a quadriplegic, but by whichever lingo you want to go by i'm effectively uncured. My condition has remained unchanged since my injury -- so I definitely have 'skin in the game' on this topic.
'Don't worry.. .. give you functioning limbs again.' would be seen by quite a few other paralyzed folks I know to be pretty offensive. I'm thick skinned, but many others aren't. The immobility granted by a nerve injury is just one of many terrible experiences a sufferer of such a condition may go through.
In other words: "Ignore the loss of bladder and bowel control, infertility and ED, the triggering of auto-immune diseases, breathing irregularity, heart arrhythmia, generally much reduced life-span, and the necessity for round-the-clock nursing care, here's an arm back!" is not an effective enough treatment for which we can say 'Don't worry' yet.
I do have hope -- but the techie in me has more faith in the pursuit of BCI/Spinal-cord-skipping rather than biological treatments.
Thank you for covering this issue properly. I cannot thank you enough. As a disabled individual, I appreciate you telling it for what it actually is here. That can be hard to do.
(I'm sorry, but what follows is likely a bad analogy…)
I imagine this is similar to the difference between fixing a low-level bug (e.g. a kernel or CPU bug) and a bug in a relatively high-level application.
The autonomic dysfunction (including the super-horrible autonomic dysreflexia events) would still occur in higher level spinal cord injuries, including in people with higher level paraplegia and more commonly in quadraplegia, in the case of nerve transfer. It is not as good as it sounds, as autonomic dysreflexia occurs in up to 90% of people with injures above T6, to varying degrees. The autonomic ganglia (which runs adjacent to the spinal cord, and consists of a different type of nerve) controls this, not the spinal cord. You simply cannot do a nerve transfer for the autonomic nervous system without just about dying. By the way, trust me, autonomic dysreflexia is actually one of the worst feelings in the world.
I had a friend who broke his toes repeatedly to do so before track events. I had another friend in physical rehab that used to purposely sit on his own testicles to trigger an AD fit for the same purpose.
It's a pretty terrible feeling, but I guess if there is a strong enough desire to win you can put yourself through whatever you need to. I've gone through a lot of shit medically, but AD and the accompanying loss of blood pressure and uptick in heart-rate is one of the closest to "feeling like i'm going to die" i've ever been.
I know, there are plenty of reasons that certain diseases have been harder to crack, but the disparity always seems so striking. This nerve transfer study seems so incredible and futuristic, and yet there is still so far to go.