[Lara]

Hi Bobby! and everyone.

I've been away from the internet and thus these forums for a very long time. I've recently moved and am back online.

I used to drop in here to the ALS forum every day I was on the net. 99% of the time I read, but sometimes I posted. I also knew Charlie from Australia pretty well and he used to call into our old TS chats elsewhere when there was no-one around for him to talk with.

I've just watched a tv show on SBS tv station in Australia called "The Doctor Who Makes People Walk Again". SBS - Vic Washby
The Doctor Who Makes People Walk Again
29 December 2008 | 14:21 - By Documentaries @ SBS
Tuesday, 30th December 7:30PM AEDT

It was so heart wrenching. I was sitting here since it finished just crying. The family seemed to hold so much hope, as one would.

More specifically, The Doctor Who Makes People Walk Again? follows the story of Vic Washby, a once athletic Englishman who can no longer walk and is losing control of his other muscular functions since developing a form of life-threatening motor neurone disease called ALS.

He and his young wife, Katrina, and their two small children travel to China to undergo the procedure, and we watch them anxiously await the outcome in the days and weeks following. Although many other patients in the hospital make amazing recoveries, for Vic and Katrina the operation is not nearly as life-changing as they had hoped.

- - - they didn't mention this part on the tv documentary, but on the SBS website it says...

Meanwhile, a leading scientist in this field, Professor Raisman, who has experimented with OEC treatment on rats, expects to start clinical trials of the procedure in the UK in the next two years. He believes, like Dr. Huang, that using this method there will be an historical breakthrough in the West where injuries that have never been treated before will be come treatable, and where the incurable will one day be cured.

[Lara]

I just found this article from 2004.

Professor Raisman said something totally different then.

From The Times
December 18, 2004
Wait a bit for conventional help, say scientists
By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent

Professor Raisman is also sceptical of Dr Huang’s claim that OECs can help patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the motor- neurone disease that afflicts Professor Stephen Hawking.

“That ALS should improve with this is an absolute bolt from the blue,” he said. “There is no conceivable physiological mechanism by which it could work. Spinal-cord injury and ALS involve totally different mechanisms of disease.”