The utterly pathetic events that the Catholic Church has been selling us as miracles over the centuries strangely never included the regrowing of limbs or paralysed folks standing up, throwing their crutches away and walking again. Because, for that to happen, sleazy religious card tricks won’t do, you need real science :
NEW YORK – For the first time, a patient paralyzed from the waist down — a 25-year-old man — has been able to stand up on his own and take a few steps.
The patient was a volunteer for this kind of treatment, he became paralysed from the chest down (subluxation at C7-T1 level) after an accident in 2006. With spinal cord injuries, the nerve impulses from the brain to the muscles are interrupted, and the muscles then don’t work anymore, leading to paralysis. Essentially, what those researchers found was that the neurons in the spinal cord can be stimulated to send out impulses to the muscles, just as the brain does, which together with a lot of training, has now allowed this paralysed man to stand again, and even take a few steps on a treadmill. He does need assistance with balance, because the signals from the nerve endings in the skin that signal position in 3-D space are obviously not being received in the brain, making him unsteady.
Now, here’s the really cool thing :
Additionally, 7 months after implantation, the patient recovered supraspinal control of some leg movements, but only during epidural stimulation.
What that means is that he regained some leg control through the brain while the stimulator was on, indicating some kind of repair at the level of the damaged cord segment.
This is very impressive research, and now it needs to be finetuned and developed with more patients in the coming years. It’s certainly better than anything religion has ever done in the miracle department in 3000 years. Science, it works !
