CASE IN POINT: A chance trip to Cuba provides new hope for a man headed for life in a wheelchair.

TARNIE WILLIAMS, a technology entrepreneur and board member of YM Biosciencies, has multiple sclerosis. After many weeks at prestigious medical facilities, like the Whitaker Wellness Clinic in Newport Beach, California, his condition only worsened: the right side of his body was extremely weak. Mr. Williams began to give up hope: “They all said, ‘You’ll be in a wheelchair; you’ll just have to accept it‘”, he recalls.

Mr. Williams was resigned to that eventuality – until he travelled to Cuba for first time, for a YM Biosciencies board meeting. After seeing his condition, German Roges, a Cuban researcher, suggested he visit Cuba’s International Center for Neurological Restoration..

Three years later, after spending roughly one month a year in the center, Mr. Williams isn’t only walking without crutches, but his once semiparalyzed right side is almost fully regenerated.

Rather than giving Mr. Williams medication to fight the illness, which prevents the brain from communicating with other parts of the body, the doctors gave him intense physical therapy. “They’d put weights on my legs and lift them up and down for eight hours a day,” he says. “After a while, the legs started sending messages to my brain, and the brain caught on”.

Why couldn’t a North American clinic offer the same solution offered in Cuba, which is widely considered to be a third world country? “It’s mostly about economics”, says Mr. Williams. The center gave him a highly qualified specialist, with two years of training in kinesiology and two years in neurology for eight hours a day. “Even if they knew about this treatment”, he adds “No one in the States would find in feasible”. It definitely wouldn`t be feasible for a $ 2 500 consultation fee and $1 500 a week for six days a week of treatment – almost tenth of what Mr. Williams paid at the Whitaker Clinic. “But there’s really no price for health”, he says. Today, Mr. Williams can walk. --D.L.

http://www.ciren.cu/paginas/GRUPO_MENU3/TESTIMONIOS_COMPONENTES/I-testimonio_3.htm

“I arrived in here on a wheelchair…..” Aurora Levins Morales (patient) United States

I arrived in here on a wheelchair. And after less than 2 weeks of treatment I am already walking more than 200 meters. This service is not available in my country.

Although I come from a very rich country, you can not find this level of rehabilitation there. Here we work 7 hours a day, including Saturdays until midday. It is a very intensive work that renders wonderful results.

I appreciate with all my heart the treatment that I have received in here. I am very thankful to all who work at CIREN and the whole Cuban people.

This treatment has changed my life.

http://www.ciren.cu/paginas/GRUPO_MENU3/TESTIMONIOS_COMPONENTES/I-testimonio_2.htm

TESTIMONY FROM A VENEZUELAN PATIENT. FERNANDO CARRILLO

----- Original Message -----
From: fernando carrillo
To:csuarez@neuro.ciren.cu
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2011 9:47 AM
Subject: hola doctor


Good day! Doctor! I am Fernando Carrillo, my greetings and respect. I write this letter to say hello and to express my gratefulness to all CIREN’s personnel for their contribution to my improvement and advance in my rehabilitation.

From my heart a big hug and greetings for all. I want to fell you that I have continued with my rehabilitation here in Venezuela and it has been favourable that I have managed to walk about 35 meters by my stretchers. I owe all this to the effort and dedication at all of you, that is why I feel so grateful and with a strong desire to return to improve my condition. Greetings! I will write again. Chao! I hope you are okay.

Fernando Carrillo
Clinic of Rachimedullar Lesions, Neuromuscular Diseases and Multiple Sclerosis.

http://www.ciren.cu/paginas/GRUPO_MENU3/TESTIMONIOS_COMPONENTES/I-testimonio_5.htm

OZONE THERAPY THE RACHIDEAN PAIN

A 70 – 80% adults are affected by any type-episode of lumbago during their lives and it is considered the most frequent cause of disableness to work in the whole world.

Different factors are determined to weaken inter-vertebral discs as to its use and wearing out produced by age, overweight, inadequate postures, performance of violent movements, weight-lifting in an incorrect way and the many traumas.

Many factors intervene in the discoggonic pain, such as, compression, inflammation, self-immuning, intra-neural edema, vascular or ischemic and neurotoxic problems. That is to say, a precise diagnosis is required together with most adequate procedures.

A correct diagnosis should include a clinical exam an imagenologic one (TAC, MRI, etc) - and an electromyographic study with which a precise treatment should be followed – it may be prophylactic, conservatic or surgical.

Ozone application in Medicine is very helpful, as there is a fast reaction with diverse components of the human body, depending on the dosis and administration for the performance of its therapeutic action.

Ozone is an allotropic variation of an oxygen element, which contains one more atom than atmosphere oxygen (O3).

The success of this treatment refers to the following:
1.- Diminish the size of the discal hernia
2.- Improve the blood-oxygen offer at radicular disc conflict zone.
3.- Reduce the peri-radicular edeme (with an immune-modulator effect).
4.- Analgesic action on the sinu-vertebral nerve.

The first reference of ozone treatment started in the 80’s and it described para-vertebral ozonotherapy for the treatment of lumbar pain caused by the discal hernia. The first experiences in Cuba started in 1999 for intra-discal ozone therapy.

The treatment of discal hernia with ozonotherapy can be by: para-vertebral infiltration and a combined para-vertebral one with rectal, intra-discal, peridural infiltration and peridural under fluoroscopic vision and intra-sacral peridural.

We may conclude that a precise diagnosis increases the possibility of a correct procedure with ozone therapy that may be simple, effective, ambulatory and with low indexes for complications.

These treatments are performed by multidisciplinary groups under the guidance of anesthesiologists.

http://www.ciren.cu/paginas/GRUPO_MENU_DERECHA/NOVEDADES_COMPONENTES/I-novedad_3.htm

NOBEL PRIZE IN MEDICINE:

“PHARMACCEUTICAL COMPANIES BLOCKADE MEDICATIONS THAT DO CURE, BUT ARE NOT INCOME-PRODICING”

The Nobel Prize winner, Richard J. Roberts, denounced operating ways of great pharmaceutical companies within the capitalist system that prefer economic benefits to public health, therefore stopping the scientific advance of curing as it is not an income-producing chronicity.

Revealed data show that powerful pharmaceutical companies in the United States spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year, to pay doctors for them to promote the companies’ medications.

To complement these data, we reproduce the interview with the Nobel Prize in medicine, Richard J. Roberts, who asserted that medications that do cure, are not income-producing- a reason why these products are not developed by pharmaceutical companies- but instead, they do develop chronified medications consumed in serial-form.

This issue, said Roberts, is about some medications that could really cure a disease, are not consequently investigated. He asks himself up to what point this is valid, as to whether the health industry is guided by the same values and principles of capitalist market which are very much alike to those of the maffia’s, the interview was originally published by the Spanish Journal “Vanguardia”.

- Can the investigation be planned?

- - If I were the Science Minister, I would look for enthusiastic people with interesting projects; I would give the money just for them to do nothing but investigate. I’d let them work for ten years and surprise us.

- It seems like a good politic.

- It is usually believed that to get far, one has to support basic investigations, but if one wants more immediate income-producing results, one must bet for the applied …

- And it is not so? 

- Frequently, most income-producing discoveries have been made starting from very basic questions. That is how the gigantic and billionaire US biotech industry for which I work, was born

- How was it born?

- Biotechnology arose when passionate people started to ask if genes could be donated, so they started to study and tried to purify them

- A whole adventure!

- Yes, but no one expected to become rich with those questions. If was difficult to get fundings to investigate responses, until Nixon launched the war against cancer in 1971.

- - Was it scientifically productive?

- If permitted lots of investigations, like min with an enormous amount of public fundings, that were no good directly against cancer, but it was useful for the understanding of mechanisms that permitted life.

- What did you discover?

- Phillip Allen Sharp and I were awarded for the discovery of introns at the eurocariotic DNA and gene-splicing mechanism.

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