Therapy for spinal-cord injuries helping Coloradans regain mobilility

It is Day 1,097 since James Nall's right leg stopped listening to him. Nall sits on a couch just 10 feet from the stairway where he fell and broke his neck. Moving on from a devastating spinal-cord injury is even harder when, a dozen times a day, you pass the basement stairs that tripped you. And Nall is ready to move on. That's why he's yelling at the leg.

"I hate you," he says, grabbing the thigh muscle and kneading it hard. "You'd think I'd have patience by now. But I do not."

James Nall's therapists all know that if they ask him to do something 10 times, he'll do it 15. A crawling exercise in Craig Hospital's PEAK workout gym is his toughest task. "You gotta crawl before you can walk. I gotta retrain everything. I'm like a giant kid -- a big baby." (THE DENVER POST | Craig F. Walker)

The thing is, his leg may finally be listening. And talking back.

Months into in a new program at Craig Hospital in Englewood, Nall's body is responding. He has shuffled 310 feet in a gym using a walker and can stand on his own for five minutes at a time.

The most promising development in decades of frustrating research on paralysis is that it now appears the spinal cord can learn, and legs can be retrained to walk. Cut off from brain instructions by a traumatic injury, the hyper-sensitive spinal column could become its own brain.

For Nall and a growing number of spinal-cord patients, progress comes after agonizing months strapped to complex movement machines and fitted into high-tech "exoskeletons," with electrodes delivering painful shocks to dormant muscles. By reminding the spine of the proper motion, it remembers how to walk. Slowly the patient takes over.

The treatment, known as locomotor therapy, upends many long-held assumptions about paralysis and represents an advance for technology over medicine. In the absence of a miracle cure, recovery traditionally has focused on adaptation: Get finger movement back to grip utensils and clothing, build arm strength to jump a wheelchair over a street curb.

James holds steady in his turn as a guinea pig in a training exercise for Craig's director of physical therapy, Candy Tefertiller. He volunteers, he says, because he feels Tefertiller is on a mission, and "Craig Hospital has done so much for me, anyway I can give back, I'll do it." (THE DENVER POST | Craig F. Walker)

Locomotor therapy refuses to write off the injured parts. Advocates are reaching back to patients injured decades ago, and moving them from wheelchairs to walkers. From public buses to their own cars. From expensive home-health aides to transferring themselves into bed.

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Therapy for spinal-cord injuries helping Coloradans regain mobilility