The Detroit News. Therapists, nurses, family and friends shuffle in and out of the hospital room several times before Dr. Barth Green shows up. Thomas has a lot of questions, but Green can't answer all of them. Without lying or offering false hope, Green tells Thomas about the advances in treating spinal cord injuries. Many of them are owed to the Miami Project.
Doctors think they are closing in on a cure.
In the last few years, the Miami Project has developed a muscle-stimulation device that allows people with spinal cord injuries to walk, a method that allows paralyzed men to have children and computer technology to aid in monitoring neurological activity in the spinal cord during surgery. Green says the mere mention of this kind of progress just 10 years ago would have made him the laughing stock of the medical community. Spinal cord injury occurs when the nerves of the spinal cord are damaged, often resulting from the fractured vertebrae crushing the cord. Scientists have been unable to get the nerves to repair themselves. Just recently, though, scientists identified a gene that prevents the regeneration.