MOBILIZING VICTIMS OF SPINAL INJURIES WITH NEW TECHNIQUES ON THE TABLE, SURGEON IS MENDER OF BROKEN BACKS.(Living)

Byline: Robert Whitaker Staff writer

Three hours into the spinal surgery, Dr. Allen Carl's forehead was glistening with sweat.

He had spent the first part of the surgery digging out bone chips from the patient's broken vertebra and meticulously scraping away soft tissue from the two vertebrae that were to be fused. It had been painstaking, slow work.

For hours, Carl hovered over the patient's back, at times even thrusting his weight behind his scraper to pick the bone clean.

If any tissue was left on, it could spoil the bone graft that would help this patient walk again.

Now he was ready for the difficult part of the surgery. Four screws had to be drilled into the patient's backbone, only millimeters from the spinal cord. The screws would hold the instrumentation that would fuse the spine together.

Carl picked up a mallet and surgeon's awl. This would not be timid work. With quick, sure strokes, he punched starter holes for the screws.

"The spine is scary," he admitted after the surgery was over. "There are colleagues of mine who, if they had to put screws in the spine, would say they didn't feel comfortable. But I went out of the country and trained with someone who did a lot of surgery, and I learned not to be scared of the spine."

Carl, 37, an assistant professor at Albany Medical Center, is helping to push forward the art of mending broken backs. It is an art that is enabling some patients who suffer an "incomplete" spinal cord injury to begin walking only weeks after having been temporarily paralyzed in accidents.

Each year, an average of 12,500 people suffer spinal cord injuries. Five thousand will die from those injuries, often from suffocation. Of those who survive, 45 percent suffer a "complete" spinal cord injury and be permanently paralyzed, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center in Birmingham, Ala. The remaining 55 percent can hope to regain some degree of movement, their rehabilitation quickened by the new methods of back surgery that have been developed over the past few years.

"The biggest advances in orthopedic surgery is that they are now able to get the patients mobilized faster," said Dr. Lynne Nicolson, medical director of Sunnyview's spinal …