Extreme measures

[paramoto]

I am not sure this thread belongs in the cure forum, if that is so, then please moderators move it. I write this after reading the latest posts on the Ricci Kilgore thread.

I was watching TV last night and caught the last part of a movie called "Extreme measures" when I realized the movie was about "The cure".

It immediately caught my attention and watched the movie´s plot develop. Some here may know that it is about a rogue doctor whose daughter (I think) or a very close relative is SCI, and operates on destitute people to advance on his theory for a cure, most times ending in the persons death.

Although probably more dramatic than most cases today, it seemed very relevant to what is going on today in many clinics around the world whose motivation seems to be exclusively profit oriented with nothing on their records or scientific publications of any kind, mostly unsupervised and full of promises.

It seemed like a recent movie and I wondered why I had never heard of the film, so I searched for the year the movie was released. Jeeez, the movie was released in 1996, 12 years ago and seven before my injury. 12 years have flown by and here we are.

The search for a cure must continue, and I recognize that advances have been made and procedures to attenuate the effects on accutes seem to hold promise as in the case of Kevin Everett. But it made me realize that this is a slooooow process. For chronics, as far as a cure or progress offering functional improvement is concerned, not much seems to have changed in the past 12 years.

I guess that even after 5 years of reading and learning about this "club" we all unfortunately belong to, I still feel like a rookie sometimes.

[JenJen]

Is that the movie with Hugh Grant and Gene Hackman? I saw part of it on late-night tv shortly after my injury. I was still in rehab. I thought it the premise was ridiculous; that ppl were so desperate for THE CURE that they would participate in this conspiracy.

Stupid thing was that I dropped the remote and couldn't reach it and I was stuck with that $%#%%ing movie all night.

[shak]

The search for a cure must continue, and I recognize that advances have been made and procedures to attenuate the effects on accutes seem to hold promise as in the case of Kevin Everett. But it made me realize that this is a slooooow process. For chronics, as far as a cure or progress offering functional improvement is concerned, not much seems to have changed in the past 12 years.

I guess that even after 5 years of reading and learning about this "club" we all unfortunately belong to, I still feel like a rookie sometimes.[/quote]




great thread paramoto . i haven't seen the movie but the paragraphs above i think are the meat of what your saying. i'm all about analogies so here goes.

lets take the motocross backflip for example anyone who has seen one done on tv knows they are a remarkable thing to witness, live it's got to be awesome . now i remember when this move was thought to be impossible,for good reason i might add cause you got to be kinda tilted in the head to even want to try one.
so what conspired to make the impossible not only possible but expected at the big shows for mtx?

first i think you need a rider. this rider needs to have the vision the talent and brave arrogance to push the cynics and physics to a place were the flip becomes a plausibility that can no longer be denied. then he needs to amass a team, cause amazing shit don't happen without help. thats called luck. and if your counting on luck to get you upright when your backfliping a 350 lb bike with a running engine 30 ft in the air, well you haven't thought things threw.
so now this team has got to get you there. these people have to have been part of the growth and advancement of mtx, chiefs and braves of the sport so to speak. they have to understand the technological limitations to overcome. the track enhancements necessary the safety gear the physical strength the rider will need the fuel the oil the wind direction, tire pressure tire type. you get what i mean . there going to have to break it down, then line it all up as precises as they can. all this while still in the realm of the unknown, this jump has never been done ever. hopefully theres other teams and other riders out in the mtx world who are gunning for it also but still nobody has done it yet. one thing for sure is there are riders and teams out there who think its a lost cause but they suck so who cares, our team can't even let them in our heads.
all this preparation the culmination of generations of mtx experience calculations and definitely failed attemps and then bang. its nailed. and it even kinda fuckin looks easy. so how close are we. i have no doubt we are always right there.

thats how i see the universe unfolding in front of us. fast and slow, failure and succusses but always progression even in the cynics world because lucky for them a team is out there turning the downside up.

boy i'm nervous about sending this oh well rip it apart people.

[paramoto]

I hope it happens, and soon. The movie just made me realize that someone 12 years ago must have been thinking the exact same thing, and here we are 12 years later. That leaves me with a very empty feeling. I have my hopes up on the effort of extraordinary people like Dr. Young, Dr. Barth Green and others like them. I respect the effort others on this forum are doing as well. I just hope something happens soon.

The search for a cure must continue, and I recognize that advances have been made and procedures to attenuate the effects on accutes seem to hold promise as in the case of Kevin Everett. But it made me realize that this is a slooooow process. For chronics, as far as a cure or progress offering functional improvement is concerned, not much seems to have changed in the past 12 years.

I guess that even after 5 years of reading and learning about this "club" we all unfortunately belong to, I still feel like a rookie sometimes.

great thread paramoto . i haven't seen the movie but the paragraphs above i think are the meat of what your saying. i'm all about analogies so here goes.

lets take the motocross backflip for example anyone who has seen one done on tv knows they are a remarkable thing to witness, live it's got to be awesome . now i remember when this move was thought to be impossible,for good reason i might add cause you got to be kinda tilted in the head to even want to try one.
so what conspired to make the impossible not only possible but expected at the big shows for mtx?

first i think you need a rider. this rider needs to have the vision the talent and brave arrogance to push the cynics and physics to a place were the flip becomes a plausibility that can no longer be denied. then he needs to amass a team, cause amazing shit don't happen without help. thats called luck. and if your counting on luck to get you upright when your backfliping a 350 lb bike with a running engine 30 ft in the air, well you haven't thought things threw.
so now this team has got to get you there. these people have to have been part of the growth and advancement of mtx, chiefs and braves of the sport so to speak. they have to understand the technological limitations to overcome. the track enhancements necessary the safety gear the physical strength the rider will need the fuel the oil the wind direction, tire pressure tire type. you get what i mean . there going to have to break it down, then line it all up as precises as they can. all this while still in the realm of the unknown, this jump has never been done ever. hopefully theres other teams and other riders out in the mtx world who are gunning for it also but still nobodies done it yet. one thing for sure is there are riders and teams out there who think its a lost cause but they suck so who cares, our team can't even let them in our heads.
all this preparation the culmination of generations of mtx experience calculations and definitely failed attemps and then bang. its nailed. and it even kinda fuckin looks easy. so how close are we. i have no doubt we are always right there.

thats how i see the universe unfolding in front of us. fast and slow failure and succusses but always progression even in the cynics world because lucky for them our team, a team is out there turning the downside up.

boy i'm nervous about sending this oh well rip it apart people.[/quote]

[shak]

it's happening man. i can feel it. and its going to be sweet.

[rjames]

Good analogy of the impossibility of doing a backflip on an MX bike (never been done before) to becoming common place in competition. Proving the nay sayers wrong. By the way my nephew, Mike Metzger was the first one to pull that trick in competition. I remember him telling me years ago, he was maybe 16, that he was going to pull a backflip and I thought to myself no way, it's not possible, I had been riding and racing mx for 20 years at that point...boy was I wrong.

Let's just hope that soon the SCI researchers can pull of the seemingly impossible as well.

[shak]

really? good to meet you rjames. boy we sure got some kick ass people on this forum.

[betheny]

rjames-I feel sorry for the mother of Mike Metzger. She must have had many sleepless nights!

[kickingber]

what I get from the Mx story is this: You need a team of researchers,experts in the field, all the info you can come up with, a plausable plan,and someone with the stones to go for it. That is the only to get from theory to proven fact.

[Wise Young]

Paramoto,

This film was unfortunately a fantasy that took advantage of people's interest i spinal cord injury and gave wrong impressions of spinal cord injury research. I remember it vividly because the movie took place in a hospital in New York that closely resembles Bellevue (I was the head of neurosurgery research laboratories and spinal cord injury research at New York University and Bellevue Medical Center) at the time. The villain in the movie was kidnapping dozens of homeless men to cut their spinal cord and regenerating the spinal cord. When that movie came out, I heard that Hugh Grant apologized privately to Christopher Reeve for the movie.

It is another one example of an emerging genre of movies that seeks to villainize doctors and researchers, which include the Secret of Nimh and about 40 movies fantasizing about cloning.

Wise.

I am not sure this thread belongs in the cure forum, if that is so, then please moderators move it. I write this after reading the latest posts on the Ricci Kilgore thread.

I was watching TV last night and caught the last part of a movie called "Extreme measures" when I realized the movie was about "The cure".

It immediately caught my attention and watched the movie´s plot develop. Some here may know that it is about a rogue doctor whose daughter (I think) or a very close relative is SCI, and operates on destitute people to advance on his theory for a cure, most times ending in the persons death.

Although probably more dramatic than most cases today, it seemed very relevant to what is going on today in many clinics around the world whose motivation seems to be exclusively profit oriented with nothing on their records or scientific publications of any kind, mostly unsupervised and full of promises.

It seemed like a recent movie and I wondered why I had never heard of the film, so I searched for the year the movie was released. Jeeez, the movie was released in 1996, 12 years ago and seven before my injury. 12 years have flown by and here we are.

The search for a cure must continue, and I recognize that advances have been made and procedures to attenuate the effects on accutes seem to hold promise as in the case of Kevin Everett. But it made me realize that this is a slooooow process. For chronics, as far as a cure or progress offering functional improvement is concerned, not much seems to have changed in the past 12 years.

I guess that even after 5 years of reading and learning about this "club" we all unfortunately belong to, I still feel like a rookie sometimes.

[shak]

are they villains or are they geniuses driven mad by frustration

[paramoto]

I can imagine that it is frustrating to see someone satanize the effort for a cure. I took that as an ill placed effort at dramatizing our plight. What struck me the most was that the movie took place 12 years ago, my accident was 4 1/2 years ago and 12 years seem like an eternity. I think we can only thank, encourage and support people like you, Dr. Young, and surely something will happen, hopefully soon. It just hit me though that 12 years have gone by and we are still stuck to these chairs much like people were back then.

Sorry to be off topic but, Mr. James, you are Metzgers uncle?? Damn. He is a freestyle pioneer. I saw Carey Hart almost pull it off, then Metzger did it. It was awesome. Then on TV I saw him pull two individual flips on the same run, back to back. I thought that was incredible, don´t know if he was the first one to do it. Then Pastrana with the double back flip just blew me away. Motocross is the king of all sports in my opinion.

Excellent to see your son racing go-karts.

[antiquity]

I hated that movie. Not only did it villainize researchers but SCI's were portrayed as heartless and so desperate for a cure that they'd condone murdering innocent people to get it. It certainly didn't help or further the cause or improve the publics perception of SCI's.

Para, the reason we're still without a cure is because SCI research is underfunded. The Bush admin. has refused to get behind the Christopher & Dana Reeve Paralysis Act Bill, first introduced in 2002, which would have earmarked millions in funding each year to SCI research. They've also made general cuts to the NIH's budget which has further reduced the little that was available.

[paramoto]

It is ironic that so much is spent on a war and so little towards SCI, ms, cancer, etc.

I hated that movie. Not only did it villainize researchers but SCI's were portrayed as heartless and so desperate for a cure that they'd condone murdering innocent people to get it. It certainly didn't help or further the cause or improve the publics perception of SCI's.

Para, the reason we're still without a cure is because SCI research is underfunded. The Bush admin. has refused to get behind the Christopher & Dana Reeve Paralysis Act Bill, first introduced in 2002, which would have earmarked millions in funding each year to SCI research. They've also made general cuts to the NIH's budget which has further reduced the little that was available.