Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath

VIA AlterNet. By Simon Lewis, Truthdig.

A new book highlights the experiences of 12 people whose lives were uprooted by traumatic brain injuries.

Filmmakers often treat knocks on the brain as slapstick comedy, from Buster Keaton's pratfalls to the Three Stooges' choreographed head blows and, more recently, Ben Stiller's parody of Simple Jack, the "retard," in "Tropic Thunder." Even kindly Charles Dodgson treats the Hatter at the Mad Tea Party of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," shifted in his consciousness because of mercury-induced lunacy, as a figure of fun. But one of that book's disturbing insights is that, for a Hatter with dementia, time itself stands still.

In the real world, there's no humor in insults to the brain. Chronic pain is a common complication, and tragedy often results from the suspension of time and consciousness in our skulls. Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, knows no rules, follows no timetable, recognizes no age or cultural boundaries, whether the victim is Muhammad Ali, Stephen King or someone you've never heard of. A brain injury strikes someone in America every 20 seconds, some million and a half times a year, from falls, car crashes or assaults, and at least 25,000 U.S. military members in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered such injuries from explosions, shrapnel and other causes.

Whether a brain injury happens in a moment that goes unnoticed -- perhaps an unfelt mosquito that vectors a neuropathogen into someone's bloodstream -- or is part of a catastrophic loss of consciousness, it challenges a soul from that moment forward, a life changed, perhaps into decades of psychosis and suffering that prove Gerard Manley Hopkins' insight, "No worst, there is none."

Read the rest>>>

The Toilet: Our Greatest Health Breakthrough Ever?

Via AlterNet; By Marco Visscher

The toilet could be even more important than vaccines to our health.

While scientists may regard penicillin or vaccinations as the greatest medical breakthroughs of all, Jack Sim claims toilets have done more for our health. Sim, founder of the Singapore-based World Toilet Organization, wants everyone

Publish Post

to have access to a clean and safe toilet.

Do we really have the toilet to thank for being healthy?

"In the West, the toilet brought an end to epidemics. Toilets and hygiene have been shown to be the best preventive medicine. But London's Great Plague of 1665 showed that the treatment of excreta is equally important. Today, hundreds of millions of people in rural areas and slums around the world still flush sewage directly into rivers."

Read the rest>>>

Combining Computers, Technology and Disability Services

We are Advocates promoting education, training, and support of computer based technology. We welcome visitors to view and post any questions in the forum. We are a team of individuals with varying degrees of disabilities and special needs who have joined together to provide free technical assistance and advice to people with disabilities and chronic issues.

We cover Technology and provide free support from A to Z for computers & related devices.

Health topics and rehabilitation advice accompany our group Newsletters. We have weekly Video/Chat sessions surrounding issues in our lives. The one boundary which we most easily overcome is communications. With free and open dialogue we can renew our soul.

Here is just one of our many Web Sites:
DISABILITY PC TECH SUPPORT SOLUTIONS @ Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=13857102882

DISABILITY PC TECH Forum Space

Click on CREATE ACCOUNT BELOW - Please feel free to join us when you have the time.

Join!__** CREATE YOUR ACCOUNT **__

Tech Support Forum Space http://disabilitypctech.wikidot.com/forum:start

MEMBERSHIP BY PASSWORD = enabletechuser

A Few Resources

A free computer program that helps people who get benefits find ways to increase your income through work incentives.

A program where people on Medicare or Food Stamps can get a reduction in your monthly phone bill.

A program that can help you reduce your student loans if you work for a nonprofit organization.

And a website that makes it very easy to write your representative.

DPCT Techology Training Session

Title:		North American Enable Disability Health /Video Technology Training Session
Date:		Sunday October 19, 2008
Time:		6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Repeats:		This event repeats every week until Tuesday December 30, 2008.
Location:		http://www.lingr.com/room/Health.Tech
Notes:		Lingr-Enable/ Disability Health and Video Technology Training Sessions Combined http://www.lingr.com/room/Health.Tech Times as below 6-00pm-PST SUNDAY EVENING 8-00pm-CST 9-00pm-EST THANKS FROM CHERE,ROCKY AND MANAGEMENT North American time 6p PST, 8p CST, 9p EST.

Artificial Eyes Are Not Sci-Fi

High tech artificial eyes aren't something out of the new science fiction show "Fringe," they're really real! Be sure to see the report from Technology Review:

For many blind or partially sighted people, implants that stimulate healthy nerve cells connected to their retinas could help restore some normal vision. Researchers have been working on such implants since the 1980s but with only limited success. A major hurdle is making an implant that can stay in the eye for years without declining in performance or causing inflammation.

Now researchers with the Boston Retinal Implant Project, which was spun out of MIT, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1988, have developed hardware they say overcomes such issues. The implants have been tested in animals, and the group plans to start human trials by 2010.

In retinal diseases such as acute macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, the light-sensing cells of the retina may no longer work, even though the neurons that carry signals from these cells to the brain are still healthy. The Boston project uses an array of electrodes to stimulate these cells and reproduce a simplified visual image in the subject's brain. A camera mounted on a pair of eyeglasses captures an image, which is rapidly processed by a microcontroller to produce a simplified picture. This is then wirelessly beamed to the implant, which activates 15 electrodes inside the eye. The implant also receives power wirelessly from the microcontroller.

In its current form, the implant can reproduce only a 15-pixel image, but the group is working on a version with around 100 pixels and hopes to get up to 1,000 eventually.

The latest implant has been successfully tested in pigs, whose eyes are comparable in size to our own. It hasn't yet been tested in people, but the research group is confident it will restore enough vision to let people walk around unaided.

Restoring Movement to Paralyzed Limbs

Here's a thought-proking article about new developments in medical technology that can make a big impact on people with spinal cord injury or other types of paralysis; this from io9 in regard to a recent report by Nature:

Using a computerized connector between the brain and muscles in the body, scientists have been able to restore movement to paralyzed limbs. A group of neuroscientists report in Nature today that they used a brain-computer interface to join the motor cortex of an ape to the muscles in its wrist. After scientists paralyzed the ape's arm temporarily, it was still able to make its wrist move my sending electrical impulses directly from its brain to the muscles, bypassing the damaged nerves in between. The study has profound implications for people whose nerves have been severed or damaged, leaving them paralyzed.

Human implementations for the technology are at least a decade away, but this discovery could be a game-changer for dealing with paralysis. One possibility would be to connect the motor cortex with an area of the spine below an injury. Signals would be re-routed around the damaged spinal cord, and could allow the brain to regain control of the paralyzed body parts affected by the injury.

Your thoughts??

Image via Cortech Solutions.

Direct Control of Paralyzed Muscles by Cortical Neurons via Nature

Disability Blog Carnival: Capacities & Capabilities Reminder

The next Disability Blog Carnival is at Barriers, Bridges and Books. The theme is “Capacities and Capabilities”. On that blog, Terri recently posted a reminder about the blog carnival, in which she said:

“What have you learned or become that you might not have without and encounter with disability? Have you become a medical expert, education specialist, behavioral manager, mechanic, efficiency expert, law specialist, problem-solver, activist, interpreter, ambassador, poet? Or something else that I haven’t thought of….Has your faith, creativity, determination, efficiency, patience, impatience, techno-savviness, assertiveness, connectedness, sensitivity, sense of humor or some other trait grown or been changed? Any of the above? All of the above? None of the above, but something else entirely??”

Are you participating?

Progressive Voter Guide to Health Care

VIA AlterNet
Posted October 17, 2008

The United States is the only wealthy, developed nation that does not provide guaranteed health care for all of its citizens, regardless of their ability to pay. According to Families USA, a nonprofit and nonpartisan health organization, nearly 90 million Americans (almost a third of the country) went without health care for all or part of 2006-2007. Because the uninsured are less likely to get routine preventive care, they are more likely to wind up sick. That's a problem for all of us because sick people are less productive than healthy ones, and when the uninsured can't afford to pay their medical bills, health premiums go up, passing extra costs on to everyone else.

In spite of the large number of uninsured Americans, the United States spends more than $2.1 trillion each year on health care. That's more than any other nation and is expected to double by 2017. Considering how much money we spend on health care, one would expect the United States to be one of the healthiest nations in the world. But we're not. We're one of the sickest. Our rates of chronic (and often preventable) conditions like obesity, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease are on the rise, while life expectancies are on the decline. In fact, babies being born right now in 41 other countries can expect to outlive a baby born today in the United States.

Read the rest...

Hope for those with disabilities

Via The Charlotte Observer

By Mark Price
msprice@charlotteobserver.com
Photo by Diedra Laird
dlaird@charlotteobserver.com

In a city where being homeless and jobless represents a worst case scenario, Susan Robinson and Dwayne Dunn prove there are greater challenges.

They were jobless, broke and living with disabilities.

She has multiple sclerosis. He is paralyzed from the waist down because of a bullet to the back 17 years ago.

Neither has met, but both are clients of a little-known nonprofit that represents one of Charlotte's least publicly supported charities, Disability Rights & Resources. It received only $3,042 in designated money last year from donors to United Way's annual campaign.

United Way of Central Carolinas was able to contribute an additional $110,000 by dipping into the Community Care Fund. That fund, which consists of undesignated donations, is in jeopardy now, due to predictions of a shortfall in this year's campaign.

Susan Robinson had been living homeless with her husband, Steve, and teenage daughter before Disability Rights offered help paying deposits for utilities and rent. That enabled the couple to move into a modest home off Wilkinson Boulevard, but it didn't happen fast enough to keep her 17-year-old daughter from being placed in foster care.

“I wanted that to happen, because it's not safe on the streets for a girl her age,” says Robinson, 43, who has been struggling financially since moving to Charlotte from Winston-Salem in 2006. “I've slept on grass, behind bushes, behind buildings, on concrete, you name it. The only place I didn't sleep was under a bridge. That's when you know you've hit rock bottom.”

Dunn, 34, wasn't living on the streets, but his situation was bad in its own way. He had no home, so he bounced from place to place, including a couple of months this year in an assisted living facility.

“Since July, I was staying at a friend's house and I couldn't get my wheelchair into the bathroom, so I had to use a commode chair,” he says. “I couldn't take showers for months. I took bird baths in the kitchen sink for 30 or 40 minutes at a time.”

He got an apartment last month, thanks to DR&R, and has leads on job opportunities. “I've got peace of mind now,” he says, “because I'm not an inconvenience to anybody.”

Disability Rights & Resources helps dozens like Dunn each year, many of whom are stuck in assisted living facilities because they don't have any place else to go. Julia Sain, executive director of DR&R, says that's like being forced to stay in a hospital when you're not sick. “They are told when to go to sleep, when to wake up, when you will be fed and what you will eat,” she says. “One size fits all and everybody eats the green Jell-O. It breaks your spirit. We give them hope.”

The organization has a broader goal of advocating for all people with disabilities, and that includes making sure owners of public buildings know when they're not meeting accessibility codes. The organization, which receives federal dollars, is also working to increase the amount of affordable housing that is wheelchair accessible, says Kevin Nale, who coordinates that program. He currently has a waiting list of 64 people looking for accessible homes.

Susan Robinson thinks of Nale as an angel. After eight months, her home still has no furniture, other than a bed and an air mattress. But four walls is luxury enough, she says.

“On the day we moved in, we had a picnic of Church's Fried Chicken on the living room floor,” she says. “We talked and we prayed and we rejoiced. Then we slept on the living room floor.”

It was the best night's sleep she's had in years.