'I'm proving doctors wrong'

Who will forget the dreadful day actor Christopher Reeve took a tumble from his horse and fell so awkwardly that he broke his neck?

The 6ft 4in star, best known for his role as Superman, was only 43 years old. He was fit, healthy and exceptionally good-looking.

As well as his high-profile acting career, he played the piano well enough to have been a professional musician and was a superb athlete who did his own stunts in films. He held a pilot's licence and had twice flown solo across the Atlantic. He was an expert sailor and skier, as well as horseman.

All this came to an end in 1995 when, in the course of a cross-country event in Virginia, his horse refused a jump and threw him to the ground.

Had he fallen only slightly differently, all would have been well. But Reeve landed heavily on his head, suffering what doctors call a 'hangman's injury' - a fracture of the top vertebrae, which causes massive blood loss, difficulty in breathing and usually death.

Prompt medical attention saved Reeve's life, but doctors told him from the outset that he would never walk again - or be able to experience any sensation in his body from the neck down.

There could not have been a more cruel outcome, and Reeve seriously considered committing suicide rather than spend his life in a wheelchair.

Instead, with the aid of his devoted wife Dana, the actress he had married only three years previously, he pulled himself together and determined to do whatever he could to live with, and improve, his situation. Together they fought the diagnosis, and Reeve told the world that he would walk again - and sooner rather than later.

To most onlookers, it seemed it must be bravado. Now, eight years later, an inspiring article by Harvard professor of medicine Jerome Groopman in the American magazine New Yorker suggests that Reeve was right - and his doctors were wrong.

ONE day, while lying in bed with Dana in his country home near New York, Christopher realised he could feel his wife's touch. It was an ecstatic moment, leading to further improvements which Groopman goes on to detail later.

These encouraging developments have left Reeve with no patience with doubters and ferociously at odds with a medical profession that has accused

him of being a spoiled celebrity offering false hope to victims with similar injuries.

Faced with what he sees as a failure of nerve by the profession, Reeve has set up his own research establishment to fund scientists willing to be more adventurous. As his health improves, he has even taken to travelling as far away as Australia and Israel to look at state-of-the-art techniques for treating paralysis.

His open-mindedness has been rewarded by the most hopeful discovery so far - that it might soon be possible to speak of a real overnight cure for spinal cord injury.

This is not a miracle. Such small improvements as he has seen in himself have taken a ferocious effort of will and hard physical grind. Even today, eight years after his accident, received wisdom about the spinal cord is that it cannot regenerate itself.

For a long time, Reeve, confined to a wheelchair in the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute

in New Jersey, was not well enough to fight this pessimism. Skin and kidney infections, bouts of pneumonia, even a broken arm when his carers accidentally dropped him, all sapped his strength.

Most alarming of all was the advisory literature he was given in hospital. Reading between the lines, he realised sufferers were being told to prepare for lifelong invalidity and even an early death.

That's when he started to fight back. With Dana's help, he started browsing through all the reading matter he could find on the subject of the spinal cord.

And Reeve discovered that a handful of scientists did take a more optimistic view about its regenerative qualities.

Their theory was that the spinal cord - far from being a simple cable connecting the brain and the body that became useless once it was severed - was programmed by nature

with a memory all of its own, and this could be reactivated after an injury.

Indeed, one Californian neuro-scientist, V. R. Edgerton, had managed to teach cats with severed spinal cords to walk again by repetitive training on a treadmill.

In the late Eighties, a German doctor, Anton Wernig, working in Bonn, devised similar experiments for humans beings. retrieving information from the hard-drive of a computer.

To the horror of many of his colleagues, who thought things were moving far too fast, Wernig began to recruit a number of patients with crippling spinal injuries, including quadraplegics.

He gave them a series of laborious exercises with harnesses, footweights and treadmills and finally succeeded in getting 32 out of 33 wheelchair-bound patients on to their feet. Twenty-five of them ended up walking unaided. Only one could not be helped at all.

The results of this experiment, published just about the same time as Reeve had his appalling accident, proved just the inspiration the ailing actor needed. He resolved to try Wernig's programme.

First, however, he realised he would have to improve his physical fitness. Confined to his wheelchair, he was in danger of losing any strength he had left in his muscles. It would be essential to maintain this if ever he was to walk again.

In October 1995, just five months after Reeve had been pitched from his horse, he started a ferocious exercise regime, training his body with electrical stimuli to push the pedals on a specially designed bicycle which would give him a cardiovascular workout and improve his bone density.

In 1998 he was ready to start working on a treadmill, helped by physical therapists who held him in a harness and guided his feet in a walking motion. However, he had no success in walking.

Reeve had now been paralysed for three years and might have been forgiven for concluding the treatment was never going to work. Instead, he decided he was not applying himself sufficiently.

He told himself that a series of medical problems common to most quadraplegics had forced him to take his eye off what he really wanted to achieve. Over the months, he had developed blood clots and suffered a collapsed lung.

Reeve fought every setback and three years ago embarked on a renewed exercise programme. At last came an incredible breakthrough.

He was lying in bed with Dana when he suddenly realised he could feel her touch. He was so excited he started gesticulating with a finger - and then realised this new ability to move was no accident and he was able to wiggle his finger at will.

He is now able to breathe without a respirator and even push himself off the side of the swimming pool with his legs.

Yet even in the face of these results, most doctors remain sceptical. They believe that anyone who is going to regain movement after a spinal accident will do so after six months. If there is no improvement after this time, certainly there will be none after several years.

Many have concluded Reeve has a freak, atypical condition which accounts for his progress. They also point out it is difficult for the ordinary patient to derive hope from a celebrity who has seemingly unlimited resources to fight his illness.

Reeve's medical expenses are more than $500,000 dollars a year, of which two-thirds is paid for by insurance and the rest by generous disability benefit from three showbusiness unions. He also receives free equipment, such as his exercise cycles, from manufacturers anxious to promote their wares.

The actor remains quite unapologetic, lambasting the medical establishment for its caution.

'Put yourself in my shoes,' he urges them. 'I am 51 and I want to walk now - not when I am 71.'

He believes the methods he has used to keep himself fit should be routine therapy in injuries like his. One thing his exercises have proved beyond doubt is that patients who put themselves through the same paces have fewer bedsores, bloodclots and infections.

Reeve now heads the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, an organisation which offers annual grants of £10million to scientists willing to carry out bold experiments. He encourages them to pool their research and to extend methods that have worked on animals to humans, including stem cell therapy.

Reeve is in contact with all the scientists at the cutting edge, which does not necessarily mean in America where stem cell research has been forbidden by the Bush regime.

In an extraordinary breakthrough, scientists in Spain and China have discovered a peculiar link between the mechanics of smell and the spinal cord which seems to offer dramatic hope to patients. At least one American doctor, known to Groopman, has witnessed these experiments and endorses their findings.

Curiously Reeve himself noticed the link. He developed such an overpowering sense of smell immediately after his accident that he had to ask his wife to remove a Chinese meal he had asked her to bring to the hospital for him.

HIS ability to smell has changed at various stages of his recovery. No one knows why. All medicine knows so far is that, unlike spinal cord nerves, olfactory nerves which register odours constantly regenerate. They are the only nerves in the human body that display this capacity for self-renewal.

Three years ago, a Spanish doctor discovered that rats with severed spinal cords made a marked improvement if certain cells from their olfactory nerves were injected at the site of the injury.

In a bold move applauded wholeheartedly by Reeve, a Chinese doctor, Dr Hogyun Huang, moved immediately to clinical trials, injecting human olfactory cells from aborted foetuses into the spinal cords of nearly 400 paralysed patients.

Dr Huang claims some patients who had been paralysed for two years recovered their functions within three to five days. He now has a waiting list of 6,000 patients.

Once more, no one has any idea why this appears to work. Or why, in a recent Israeli experiment, a certain specialised human blood cell implanted within 14 days in the spinal cords of accident victims also seems to have an instant curative effect. Indeed, no one knows why Reeve himself seems to be regaining movement.

None of that matters to Reeve, who just wants to see results. Knowing he is unlikely to persuade Bush to allow stem cell research, he has successfully introduced bills at state level to reopen experiments in California and New Jersey.

From complete despair at the time of the accident, he has been revitalised by his hard work and has no patience with his critics.

'I don't care,' he says. 'What do I have to lose? There is not much more you can do to me.'

>