Paralysis

Usually it is a car wreck. But there are also wounds from gunshots, plane crashes and falls from horses, bicycles and scaffolding. Everybody's story is a little different. Kristi Reid recalls nearly every detail of those first few hours, including the name of her emergency room nurse. Sam Barukh did not even know for a month that he was paralyzed. What they and others in recovery share in common is the lifelong effect of a spinal cord injury.

Saudi Arabia denied reports that a young man had been sentenced to paralysis, a punishment that human rights groups had excoriated as a form of torture. “This is untrue,” the Justice Ministry said Monday on its Twitter account, according to a translation by blogger Ahmed Omran . The judge “dismissed the request of such punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last month that if Ali Khawahir could not pay roughly $270,000 to the friend he allegedly stabbed and paralyzed a decade ago, he in turn would be paralyzed.

Saudi Arabia denied reports that a young man had been sentenced to paralysis, a punishment that human rights groups had excoriated as a form of torture. “This is untrue,” the Justice Ministry said Monday on its Twitter account, according to a translation by blogger Ahmed Omran . The judge “dismissed the request of such punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last month that if Ali Khawahir could not pay roughly $270,000 to the friend he allegedly stabbed and paralyzed a decade ago, he in turn would be paralyzed.

Alarmed by reports that Saudi Arabia will paralyze a man as punishment for allegedly stabbing a friend who ended up paralyzed, Britain urged the kingdom Thursday to abandon the “grotesque punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last week that Ali Khawahir was sentenced to be paralyzed if he could not pay 1 million riyals - roughly $270,000 - to the friend he allegedly stabbed a decade ago. Khawahir was reportedly 14 years old when he...

Alarmed by reports that Saudi Arabia will paralyze a man as punishment for allegedly stabbing a friend who ended up paralyzed, Britain urged the kingdom Thursday to abandon the “grotesque punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last week that Ali Khawahir was sentenced to be paralyzed if he could not pay 1 million riyals - roughly $270,000 - to the friend he allegedly stabbed a decade ago. Khawahir was reportedly 14 years old when he...

For those whose arms as well as legs are paralyzed by spinal cord injury, no skill is more broadly useful to regain than the ability to grasp and move objects. Researchers reporting in Nature magazine this week say they have devised a new way to get a patient's hand to grasp a greater range of objects:  by playing recorded brain commands directly to muscle. For the paralyzed, the technique could provide brain signals a way around the broken spinal cord and allow hand movements more finely tuned to different tasks.

Michigan researchers have found the gene for a rare leg-weakening nerve disease, called hereditary spastic paraplegia, that slowly robs children of their ability to walk. As many as 20,000 Americans may suffer from the disease. The discovery should aid in diagnosis and possibly in the development of new treatments. There is no therapy now.

Scientists eased the paralysis of rats with spinal cord injuries by transplanting cells from adult mouse brains, an encouraging sign for developing human treatments, researchers reported. The paralyzed rats were given the mouse cells, called neural precursor cells, two or eight weeks after their injuries, according to the study in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Hikers who carry around heavy, poorly adjusted backpacks that put pressure on their shoulders risk developing a temporary but "frightening," paralysis of their arms, a doctor warned last week. Dr. Patrick Rosario said he first noticed a syndrome he called "trekker's shoulder" when he was hiking through the Himalayas in Nepal and came across a young man who could not move his right arm after a day spent walking down steep trails.

A doctor at UCI Medical Center is using a drug made from one of nature's most powerful poisons to treat paralysis of the vocal cords, writer's cramp and other movement disorders. Dr. Daniel Truong, director of the hospital's new Parkinson and Movement Disorders Clinic, reported that his hospital was the first in Orange and Los Angeles counties to make the unusual treatment generally available.

ATHENS — Weeks of political paralysis look set to end in Greece with the election of parties that support the country's international bailout agreements, but the question now turns to whether a fragile new government can deal effectively with a tanking economy and popular unrest. The conservative New Democracy party eked out a slim victory in Sunday's parliamentary elections over Syriza, the radical-left group that vowed to ditch Athens' multibillion-dollar rescue deals and the harsh austerity measures they entailed.

Reality TV producer Gay Rosenthal is behind such groundbreaking fare as TLC's "Little People, Big World" and Style's "Ruby. " In Sundance Channel's "Push Girls," Rosenthal explores the world of women living with paralysis - and suggests it is a reality alternative to HBO's 'Girls. " What is it like being Gay Rosenthal, reality TV producer? That's a hard question. Many times I say, if you had cameras on me, it would be a really fabulous sitcom. It's very busy. Today I started at 3:30 a.m. My days are pretty intense.

Paralyzed rats learned to walk, run and spring deftly over obstacles after they were put on a physical training regimen that included electrical and chemical stimulation of their broken spinal columns and a “robotic postural interface,” a new study reveals. The study, published Thursday in Science , suggests that for humans with spinal cord injury, the trick to regaining lost movement may lie not in regeneration of the severed spinal cord, but in inducing the brain and spinal cord to forge wholly new paths toward each other.

For those whose arms as well as legs are paralyzed by spinal cord injury, no skill is more broadly useful to regain than the ability to grasp and move objects. Researchers reporting in Nature magazine this week say they have devised a new way to get a patient's hand to grasp a greater range of objects:  by playing recorded brain commands directly to muscle. For the paralyzed, the technique could provide brain signals a way around the broken spinal cord and allow hand movements more finely tuned to different tasks.

A preliminary study finds that scuba diving may help improve muscle movement, touch sensitivity and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in people with spinal cord injuries. The small pilot study, presented Saturday at the Paralyzed Veterans of America conference in Orlando, Fla., involved 10 wheelchair-dependent disabled veterans who had suffered spinal cord injuries an average 15 years earlier and who underwent scuba diving certification. Pre-dive tests checked the participants' muscle spasticity, motor control, sensitivity to light touch and pinpricks, plus depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

The last-minute deal on the debt ceiling may prevent a government default, but it does little to avert a perfect storm of economic problems that could push the nation toward a new downturn and more financial pain for millions of Americans. Instead of increasing confidence in the future, the agreement seems to have underscored the near paralysis in Washington — and the fact that no substantial new efforts are likely for dealing with unemployment, lagging consumer spending or a host of other problems that have been dragging the economy down.

Scientists said last week that they had succeeded in regenerating nerve fibers from the human central nervous system for the first time, a step that could eventually lead to restoring some function to paralyzed limbs. The University of Miami researchers cautioned in their paper in the journal Experimental Neurology that the work has been done only in the laboratory and that it will probably be five years before researchers attempt to restore movement to paralyzed muscles.

Immediate treatment with high doses of a drug found in nerve cell membranes can dramatically limit the degree of paralysis in people who suffer from spinal cord injuries, a team of Maryland researchers reported. Their study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, could help some of the 10,000 Americans who suffer spinal cord injuries each year. Most of the victims are men under 30 who are in automobile accidents.

Cassandra Tang never learned to swim as a child and steered clear of the water. Then, when she was 22 years old, a gunshot wound paralyzed her from the chest down. Her fear of drowning intensified and she figured any chance of wading in an ocean or pool had vanished. On Sunday, Tan, now 40, was breathing nine feet underwater, coming up only to adjust her goggles and repeat the same phrase: "It's so amazing!" Tang was among a handful of participants at Deep Blue Scuba & Swim Center in Long Beach assisted by divers becoming certified by the Handicapped Scuba Assn.

You don't want to read it; I don't want to write it. It is horse racing, and already some folks are moving on to Page 3. If not the byline, the photo and headline might've been enough. It's a story about a jockey, but one unfamiliar to most in Southern California, to make it even less enticing. One who is living in San Pablo, wherever that is. He's a cousin of jockey Alex Solis, and he rode at Hollywood Park and Del Mar. So there's that. But he's here on a working visa from Panama and doesn't speak much English.