United Brachial Plexus Network, Inc.

article from 1923 50 case review

very interesting article...thanks for sharing!

This is soooo amazing.

As I read this article I kept reminding myself that this was written in 1923. No wonder my mother went from doctor to doctor to get advice and got nothing. She took me to several New York hospitals before she ended up at New York Hospital and I was braced immediately and kept in one for 11 months. The brace was only taken off for massage and ROM... I did not hand to mouth by three months in fact still don't have it.

I'm a bit upset because this information was out there and NO ONE ACTED ON IT. If they had, we would not all be here.

Even then they knew the cause of this injury was traction.

Kath:
You are right, this is soooooooooo amazing.

They knew in 1923 to do neuro and ortho repair (so much for Oxford telling us that Juliana's nerve grafting was "experimental")...

But, totally infuriating, is that they knew that it was the obstetricians and their traction.....

claudia

My understanding was that nerve repair was "in vogue" for awhile early in the 1900's, but the results were not consistently very good, anesthesia was still quite risky, grafting was poorly understood and babies died or didn't get better far too often (for instance, out of 70 patients operated on in one report, 3 died). Surgeons also only generally did neurolysis (neuroma removal) and not grafting, which is another reason why results were not as good and thus not worth the risk. Nerve surgery stopped being perfomed around 1930 and didn't start up again until microsurgical techniques came along, and the first child actually received nerve grafts in 1977. She was 4 years old and (not surprisingly) didn't get very good results.

Most of this information comes from the paper "Obstetrical Palsy: The French Contribution" by Alain Gilbert and Giorgio Pivato, SEMINARS IN PLASTIC SURGERY/VOLUME 19, NUMBER 1 2005

Kate

Articles such as this one make my blood pressure shoot wayyyyy up and such ANGER boils up from somewhere deep down in me. I know I am not the only person who grew up and suffered greatly on many different levels all of my life..(.I am 71+++++). This really SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Carolyn J