A Proposal Outline for Repair and Re-growth
of Severely Damaged Spinal Cords
Based on the Research Work of Robert O.
Becker, M.D. and His Research Team
By physicist Gary Wade
In his book THE BODY ELECTRIC, Robert O. Becker, M.D. lays out the key
experimental facts that, when considered all together, strongly suggest that a
spinal cord surgical procedure can be performed to repair and re-grow severely
damaged spinal cords. That is, repair of
injuries of long standing, as of many years.
The book THE BODY ELECTRIC was published in 1985, some twenty five years
ago. Since that time no significant
progress along the lines that Becker laid out in his book for spinal cord
repair have occurred. However, during
this twenty five years tremendous advances in the understanding of genetics and
stem cell research have occurred, which now can be used by neurosurgeons in
spinal cord repair. What will be
attempted here is the condensing of Becker’s work to bring neurosurgeons who are not familiar with Becker’s work up to speed on it. The hope and belief is that they will see the
clear opportunity to end the stagnation in surgical progress in spinal cord
repair. These neurosurgeons can give the
lives back to millions of people on this planet who are in misery, along with
their families and friends waiting for institutions and government agencies
such as the FDA to get their act together to attempt to implement Becker’s work
into a cure of spinal cord paralysis.
The time has come for the breakthrough.
There is absolutely no legitimate reason for this current state of
stagnation in surgical progress in spinal cord repair. This proposal outline will hopefully
demonstrate to neurosurgeons that the time is now for the breakthrough and that
they will come together and rally their institutions into decisive action for
the cure of spinal cord damage/paralysis.
What Becker and his team
experimentally demonstrated was that mammals (humans) can re-grow all manner of
body tissue as long as an appropriate value of negative electrical current, in
the form of hydroxyl ions, is generated and maintained directly behind the
injury/amputation site. If this
appropriate current is maintained, then
a cellular matrix called a blastema will form at the
amputation/surgical site that will continually grow outward leaving in its wake
all of the formally missing tissue, in perfect anatomical detail, until all of
that tissue is replaced.
(For easy reference, attached to this
proposal outline are all of the pages of Becker’s book, which are referred to
in this proposal outline.)
Pertinent Experimental and Observational
Facts about Salamanders and Mammals (humans)
1)
After amputation and or selective surgical removal
salamanders can re-grow all of their limbs and much of their body parts;
i.e. re-growth of half a heart in less
than 12 hours (see pages 197 to 200 of THE BODY ELECTRIC (TBE)
), re-grow an eye lens ( see pages 190 to 191 of TBE), re-grow the front
half of the brain (see pages 213 to 214 of TBE ), and re-grow and reconnect a
surgically removed piece of spinal cord (see pages 207 to 211 of TBE). See also Reference 1, pages 26 and 28.
2)
The ratio of the weight of nerve tissue to the weight
of other tissue in the bodies of salamanders as compared to that same ratio in
mammals is around 4 or 5 times bigger (see page 151 of TBE). This means that salamanders can produce
approximately 4 to 5 times more negative
current of injury(hydroxyl
ions) to the amputation site per volume of tissue than a mammal can. This negative current of injury is delivered
to the injury region by the collagen fibers of the Schwann cells coating nerve
cell axons (see Reference 1, pages 22 to 25 ). The triple stranded protein of collagen is an
N-type semi-conductor of electricity (see Page 113 of TBE ).
3)
If a small negative current (hydroxyl ions); (see
Reference 1, pages 27 to 30) supply of the appropriate magnitude is surgically
placed directly behind the fresh amputation site on a rat (mammal) leg, the leg
will begin and continue to re-grow back until the negative current of injury
supply becomes too small at that re-growth location (see pages 152 to 155 of TBE ).
Key
Assumptions and Apparent Experimental Observations of Conditions Needed to
Re-grow a Section of Spinal Cord
1)
The mammal (human) has essentially the same
regeneration ability as the salamander, as long as the normal current of injury
at the injury site on a mammal is increased by approximately a factor of 4 or 5
above that normally observed value from that injury site.
2)
An internal body part or section of tissue in a mammal
(human) can be re-grown, after surgical removal, as long as the negative
current of injury is maintained large enough (4 or 5 times normal). For example (see pages 187 to 189 of TBE ) where a section of surgically removed cartilage in the
end surface of a white rabbit femur was regrow with
an artificially enhanced negative current of injury supplied to only the
damaged tissue area/region. This is what
will be done for the damaged spinal cord.
3)
The positive electrical potential of spinal shock that
will occur from spinal surgery must/will be suppressed and removed by the
artificially produced negative current of injury supplied by the implanted
platinum electrode into the spinal cord (see pages 73 and 210 of TBE).
The Proposed Experimental Procedure to
Re-grow Spinal Cord Tissue and Thereby Repair Spinal Cord Damage
Figure 1 shows the whole spinal vertebrate column and two side views of two different
sections of a human spinal column. It is
the spinal cord tissue between adjacent spinal vertebrate that are protected by
the spinous processes of the vertebra that usually
suffers the crush damage in paralyzing traumatic injuries; i.e. car
crashes. That section of spinal cord
tissue is generally destroyed and replaced by cyst formation and/or an amorphous
jumble of astrocyte cells often referred to as neural
scar tissue.
The goal and purpose of the proposed spinal cord operation is to remove
cysts and the neural scar tissue and to remove/rough up (controlled damage)
both the top and bottom ends of the spinal cord on each side of the scar
tissue. This surgical removal/abrasion
damage is done to instigate the current of injury and associated processes, blastema formation, that will be ready to go and start
spinal cord re-growth as soon as an adequate current of injury is present. Getting FDA approval to use DMSO to suppress
associated inflammation damage would be great (see Reference 2, pages 169 to
171). The normal spinal shock positive
electrical potential that will come with this surgical procedure will be
suppressed by the implanted pure platinum plated electrode(s), which supply the
needed extra negative current of injury, since the normal current of injury in
mammals is too small to cause re-growth unless it is boosted by a factor of
around 4 or 5. A platinum needle
electrode which supplies the needed extra negative current of injury (hydroxyl
ions) is implanted in the upper section of spinal cord and the lower spinal
cord end as well (see Figure 2 ). The
physical electric circuit which supplies the needed extra current of injury is
shown in Figure 3. At this time I
believe that one pure platinum plated electrode is adequate to do the job
needed in most cases. However, there is
no reason not to try using two platinum needle electrodes in each spinal cord
end. The current supply will just be
adjusted down for each electrode.
One of the key questions to be answered is what value of carbon resistor
should be used in this spinal cord regeneration circuit (see Figure 3). Referring to Becker’s rat leg regeneration
experiment (see Figure on page 153 of TBE) we see that he obtained significant
regeneration results using resistance values approximately between 10^6 to 10^8
ohms. This corresponds to a factor of
100 in variance in relative current of injury magnitude while still getting
significant regeneration results. The
actual current generated is given by the use of ohms law. That is the current (I) is given by: I = V/R
; where V is approximately the difference between the electron work functions
for pure platinum metal and pure silver metal and is equal to the contact
potential difference between platinum and silver, which is approximately 1.3
volts; R is the value of the carbon resistor.
Now, if we can answer the question; how does the cross sectional area of
the rat leg amputation site compare to the cross sectional area of the spinal
cord location that needs repair, we can then easily determine the value of R
needed in Figures 2 and 3. Remember we
have a slop factor of approximately a 100 to work with. To a first approximation assume that the
spinal cord cross section at the particular location of damage is equal to
three rat leg amputation site cross sections that Becker used in his
experiments (see attached addendum to reference 1). Then we will need three times the current
Becker used to get significant regeneration results. By simply choosing a value of resistance
around 30 meg ohms, which is in the mid-range
resistance value used by Becker for successful rat leg regeneration, we are
assured of being in a good current of injury range for the initiation of
regeneration of one rat leg. So, by
reducing the resistance by a factor of three (10 meg
ohms) we will have the current of injury for the initiation of regeneration of
three rat legs or one spinal cord. Now,
noting that there are two pure platinum plated electrodes (one for each spinal
cord end that needs the negative current of injury for initiation of
regeneration of three rat legs) sharing the current we can half the value of R
to 5 meg ohms, so that both electrodes will have the current of injury of one
electrode that uses a 10 meg ohm resistor.
The length of spinal cord growth needed in general is quite short, being
approximately the gap length between spinal vertebrate. That distance is smaller than or comparable
to the observed re-growth length of the rat’s leg in Becker’s experiment. As the two ends of the spinal cord mate up
and properly connect together, the two Teflon coated wires can be simply pulled
out and their hole pathways will almost immediately
close up and start healing shut.
Even though the above described surgical process could or should work
alone to regenerate spinal cord injury/damage, it would be, in my opinion,
foolish not to take advantage of the great advancements in biological knowledge
and technical advancements in potentially complementary biological technologies
during and following this new spinal cord surgical procedure. For example, the use of anti-inflammatory
drugs, i.e. DMSO, which for some unknown reason is still not allowed by the FDA
to halt spinal cord damage from trauma driven inflammation (see reference 2),
the use of “scar tissue” formation suppression factors, the use of neural
growth factors, the use of the patient’s own activated adult stem cells removed
from the patient’s blood, the use of appropriate wavelengths of laser light to
facilitate spinal cord growth and the union/proper connection between both ends
of the now mending together spinal cord ends (see reference 3). The use of these complementary biological
technologies should greatly reduce recovery time and enhance the probability of
the final successful out come.
I hope I have made a persuasive case to neurosurgeons, who will do the real work of actual implementation of Becker
and his team’s work done so many years ago.
Being a layman in surgical matters, I have faith and hope that skilled
and highly trained neurosurgeons will see and know clearly how to convert
Becker and his team’s work into physical reality.
THE POLITICS ASSOCIATED WITH THIS PROPOSAL
Currently all experimental spinal cord surgeries must first be approved
by the FDA. The FDA almost invariably takes
many months to years to make a decision on a proposal. In my opinion this should not be so. The FDA should be removed from this decision
approval process. It should be totally
turned over to competent surgical committees of reputable competently run medical
institutions, period. There is no
legitimate reason for upper management politicos at the FDA making these decisions
that amount to life and death decisions for many desperate quadriplegics and paraplegics,
effectively slowly dying in misery. Let
me give you several pertinent examples of what I mean here.
Example 1 - My friend, Bill, who is quadriplegic,
e-mailed a medical doctor friend for advice on working with the FDA. Here is their e-mail correspondence:
Dear XXXXX
As you know the V.A. is ready to do something to help/cure spinal cord
paralysis. They would like to do it with
UCLA who I am meeting with on Jan. 4th. It’s going to be either something along the
lines that Dr. Becker wrote about or stem cells (perhaps a combo of both). I assume whatever is chosen to try will need
FDA approval. Do you have any idea how
long that approval process will take and any ideas how to shorten the time
frame?
Bill
Reply:
Dear Bill
As is my custom, I’m going to be frank and honest with you. The FDA approval process is long and
burdensome. It usually takes several
years to get the simplest thing approved.
Also, unfortunately, the FDA is a totally corrupt organization,
essentially run by the pharmaceutical companies that it was designed to
oversee, restrain and control.
The FDA is not there to protect the public. It is there to protect corporate interests –
mainly the interests of the drug companies.
I was part of the team that went through that FDA process years ago when
we did our “ XXXXXXXXXXXX ” studies. That took about 3 years for approval. The times for approval have NOT gotten shorter.
There are no known ways to shorten the time frame. Remember, you’re dealing with government here
– and those wheels turn VERY slowly.
XXXXXXX
Example 2 - I asked my friend Bill to write a
description of his life as a quadriplegic and to ask other quadriplegics
friends to do the same. What follows is
Bill’s story followed by one other quadriplegic friend’s story.
Dear Gary
I really try not to complain a lot since it just gets my friends or myself down even further.
I complain more to you than anyone else that I can think of because we
are so close and you seem to get it. The
easy and clear answer to complaining is putting a gun in your mouth, but since
my fingers don’t move, I don’t even have control over how I would kill myself. I wake up every morning with the same burning
question … can I do this one more day?
It’s always too hot or too cold in my room and my chest is full of junk
built up from not being moved enough over night. You can only work your care giver so hard and
a quadriplegic has to decide exactly what he or she needs to stay alive while
not upsetting the care giver. The care
giver is my life line to staying alive and finding a good care giver can take
years. Without a care giver I would only
make it a matter of hours before I needed to eat or defecate two things (plus
many more) that I can’t do myself. As
much as I desire being alone for even 8 or 10 hours, it can’t be done unless we
are talking about 9 pm till 7 am. After
that short period I need to stretch my legs out (due to intense pain) clean out
my lungs, use two different machines for ten to twenty five minutes that shake
my body for general movement in my lymphatic system and clear out excess
phlegm. The list goes on, steaming
(again to clear the lungs), using the standing table for at least an hour so
some of the leg muscles remain, and the list goes on.
All and all it takes about three
to four hours, then time for breakfast.
Although I am okayed to eat whatever I want, I
can’t afford to gain weight and I need to keep my bowels moving. So eating becomes eat what fits, but watch
out for too many calories and getting stopped up. All day I watch the clock since it rules my
life. Certain things have to be done at
certain times … period. Once breakfast
is out of the way, it’s back to the search for the cure. This process so far and what I discuss later
on is the same every day regardless if it is Thursday or Sunday. There are no breaks or vacations EVER.
Since I take a dozen or more
drugs an inventory is done twice a week and some drugs require a new script
each month. So my care giver is off to
the doctor’s office then to the drug store.
Whatever problems come up while she is gone must wait. All the time that various items are taken
care of life goes on like paying the bills or calling a plumber. The pain in my legs (which requires three
narcotics) is constant and now effects my
shoulders. With the pain your memory
slips almost daily since pain pills attack one’s mind not the pain itself,
which never leaves. The pills make you
care less about it, but you need to figure out ways to make a living to pay for
all the services like $3,650 a year to have a second person stop by and help
lift me onto a shower chair. So you not
only have a care giver, but several part time workers. You need to do things at their time schedule
not yours and your lucky if you can find them.
I mean who can live on $3,650 a year. Ergo you shower between their job and
home. When someone gets sick everything
becomes a much bigger mess. In the
beginning sleep was at a premium due to super strong spasms. They are strong enough to throw you around
the bed at night, so that I don’t focus on the spasms, I play mind games. Like what the cure will look like? Do all these companies that sell drugs really
want a cure? Am I going to be able to
still do everything once morning comes?
Is working day and night with no answer in sight worth all this
effort? Aren’t I really looking at
winning a war that is not winnable? In
the last fifteen minutes how many times have I thought about checking out
early? Is this death by a thousand
cuts? Wouldn’t it have been better to
have cut everything off as soon as I got out of the hospital for after all most
people would have forgotten me by now.
In the last four years, I have been waking up almost hourly from pain. Sleeping is very difficult for lots of
reasons including the temperature in the room.
As you know when it’s warm those very small muscles in one’s body are
suppose to slow down contraction rate.
In my body those muscles never change speed regardless of the
temperature that I am in. Air
conditioning seems to go right to the bone, so regardless of what I am wearing,
I never can warm up. If I am early for
an appointment, I usually stay in the van (if it’s cold out) or right outside
of the building if it it’s hot out.
Being comfortable in your own skin just doesn’t happen. I feel like I am in prison and my cell
happens to be exactly my body size.
Lately it has been shoulder pain that wakes me up before the leg
pain. Once your awake you feel both of
them, then start deciding if I should call my care giver, which wakes me up
further. Do I take another pain pill or
the ramifications don’t merit it. I
check my eyes often to see if they are yellow, meaning my liver is on over loaded
from pain pills. Do I want that hang
over feeling the next morning just so I might get an extra hour of sleep? All the medications have made my mouth dry so
do I drink some water and add to my water weight and kidney problems? Should I drink some water so that the tube
that goes directly into my bladder stays wet enough? The last time I was
a little short on water, that tube stuck to my bladder wall and the hospital
people told me I could die if they didn’t get the tube loose and the urine
flowing. My last blood test showed too
little salt (and no taking in more salt won’t fix that problem says my kidney
doctor) meaning I have been drinking to much water. Ah after all that thought, I am now fully
awake and in serious pain. I call my
care giver to catch her upset about something that she doesn’t want to
discuss. If I don’t show an interest she
will be down my throat in the morning is the norm. Having a female care giver is the same
relationship that you have with a spouse, but without any sexual contact. She
tells me about her life if I want to listen or not and she already knows all
about my life because we are together 24/7 plus when using the phone I have to
use a speaker phone. She has the right
to yell at me or be silent, but I can’t.
Bill
Example 3
Hello
Bill asked me to send a quick description of some of the not-so-fun
things I endure every day as a result of my paralysis and of some of the
unbelievable things that have happed to me.
In general, let’s say getting up and through every day is a battle. Pretty much every minute I am awake I am in
pain somewhere, my back, my back side or my neck. It fortunately usually isn’t so bad that
should take pain pills, which I don’t ever.
I battle my skin on my back side every day to keep from getting a
pressure sore. I’ve had several that
were deep or that healed very slowly and kept me in bed for long periods of
time.
I can not get myself in and out of bed.
So, after my care giver hopefully arrives around 7:00 in the evening,
makes my dinner, and puts me in bed and positions me for the night around
10:00, I attempt to sleep all night in the same position on my stomach, which
isn’t very restful if the positioning didn’t go well or if I have the
occasional accidental bowel movement. I
do this so my skin can heal and be ready for the next full day of sitting. Try working 8 or 9 hours a day with little
sleep. I’ve been doing it for nearly
twenty four years now.
Having no bowel or bladder
control isn’t any fun either. As long as
the suppository works and the catheter doesn’t leak or fall off and things
stick to schedule it is manageable. But
there is always the possibility of an accident and then scrambling to hopefully
find one of my caregivers or a roommate who can drop what they are doing and
help me out. Sometimes I have had to sit
for hours in burning urine - soaked pants waiting for help.
Breaking my neck in 1979 and becoming a quadriplegic wasn’t the only
major injury life had in store for me.
About 12 years ago I was sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the signal
to cross so I could wait on my van to be finished. Out of nowhere a woman runs a red light, gets
hit by a car starting out and slams into me at about 35 miles an hour sending
me with my wheelchair attached flying through the air about 20 feet up into a
parking lot where I was wedged head first under a car in the second space. She also flew up into the parking lot and hit
the car I was under, nearly hitting me twice.
I spent 6 months in bed with multiple compound fractures and missed
almost a year and a half of work.
Naturally she was poor and had the minimum insurance. So I was just as financially injured as I was
physically. I still also have
complications from that accident with weakness in my right arm, which was
snapped at the shoulder and extra problems with my skin on my right side from
my shattered femur. XXXXXXXX
Approximately 12,000 new cases of spinal cord injury occur every year in
the
You should now clearly see how desperate the situation really is and why
FDA politicos should/must be taken out of the decision making process for
experimental spinal cord surgeries. This
decision making process clearly needs to be in the hands of institutions that
have highly trained and skilled neurosurgeons that know what they are doing and
know how to judge and evaluate all new surgical proposals for curing spinal
cord paralysis. Our proposal here is only
one possible way to achieve the cure. What neurosurgeons need is for the FDA to get
out and stay out of the way. The
simplest method for this that saves face for the FDA, is for them to rubber
stamp almost any experimental spinal surgical procedure submitted by a
competent and reputable medical institution.
This proposal is going to be
presented first to the University of California at Los Angeles Medical School
Neurosurgeons and to the Veterans Administration doctors at the Los Angeles
V.A. If they accept this proposal as
viable and put their own version of it into the FDA for approval, we will wait
a short period of time for a positive FDA response (they give the go
ahead). If the FDA does the usual hurry
up and wait routine, then we will go world wide with this proposal where
progress in spinal cord repair surgery is not in a state of stagnation as it is
in the U.S. and they have no substantial FDA- like suppressor regulator agency;
i.e. China, India, Mexico, Portugal, etc..
Perhaps, if the doctors at UCLA and or the V.A. perceive that the FDA is
up to it’s usual ever so slow mode, they can be kind
enough to send copies of this proposal to their favorite contacts at the FDA,
who can pass this proposal along. This
will give the politicos a chance to consult with their pharmaceutical patrons,
who can then quickly decide if they want the FDA to gracefully allow
I can absolutely assure the FDA
that the quadriplegics and paraplegics and their families and friends have had
it with the FDA’s snail’s pace in approving new experimental procedures. Let me put it another way; what if the FDA
announced it was approving of a large number of medical institutions putting
out the call for volunteers for an experimental spinal cord operation to
attempt to cure paralysis, with the stipulations: 1) That probably 95+% of the accepted volunteers
would survive the operation; 2) There would be a small probability of a slight worsening
of their condition, and 3) There would
be a significant possibility of a significant improvement in their condition
and or a cure. How many volunteers do
you think these institutions would get?
FDA, LET MY PEOPLE GO.
References:
1)
A Physicist’s View of the Use of Feeble Electric
Direct Currents To Repair Tissue and Replace Body Parts, Part One by Gary Wade;
Health Freedom News – February 1996.
2)
POLITICS in HEALING
by Daniel Haley, Chapter 6: DMSO – The Persecuted Drug – Dr. Stanley
Jacob, pages 169 -171,187, 201,281,404;
ISBN# 0-9701150-0-8
3)
www.editinternational.com
– search engine: Laser Rejoins Spine by Noel Young
P.S. -- It is now 5/2/11 and after a very mild
positive response to the proposal from UCLA neurosurgeons, we have decided to
go public with this proposal world-wide.
P.P.S. - ATTENTION NEUROSURGEONS: Be sure to read questions and answers
Q1/A1 through Q7/A7. These should answer nearly all remaining questions
that neurosurgeons will need answered so as to perform the operation and
cure spinal cord paralysis.