ESSAY
FEBRUARY 14, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 6
<http://www.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/toc/0,3392,1101000214,00.html>
Restoration, Reality and Christopher Reeve
BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
“Paralyzed people fooled by a Super Bowl ad showing Christopher Reeve
walking have been calling an advocacy group to find out how he was
cured.”—Associated Press, Feb. 1, 2000
I have long been reluctant to criticize Christopher Reeve. It is not
easy attacking someone who suffered such a devastating injury and has
carried on with spirit. Nor am I particularly keen to violate the
Brotherhood of the Extremely Unlucky. (I injured my spinal cord when I
was 22 and have been in a wheelchair ever since.)
But his Super Bowl ad was just too much. Why did he do it? To raise
consciousness, he says. Convinced that a cure is imminent, he wants to
share the good news with the largest possible audience. For 28 years I’
ve been hearing that a cure is just a few years away. Being a doctor, I
have discounted such nonsense. Most of the spinal-cord injured, however,
are not doctors.
These are the facts. Yes, there is research into spinal-cord
regeneration and, occasionally, there are some positive results in
animal models. But the research is preliminary, at best suggestive.
There remain enormous scientific obstacles even beyond the extremely
problematic question of getting the neurons to regrow. Yes, this
research will bear fruit one day. Unhappily, it is overwhelmingly likely
that this day lies many years in the future.
Second, when that time does come, the principal beneficiaries will be
the newly injured. People long injured—who’ve developed scar tissue at
the site of the break and whose distal spinal cord (the part below the
injury) often turns to mush as the old neurons die—will be the last
people to be helped by this research, if they’ll be helped at all. The
“cure” will probably end up like the polio vaccine: preventing
paralysis, not abolishing it.
Third, even in the unlikely event there is a cure for those presently
paralyzed, it will at best be partial. The idea so dramatized in the
Super Bowl commercial—that someone with a completely severed cord will
actually walk—is very farfetched. Walking is a hugely complex motor and
feedback activity. Look at how long it takes babies, who have totally
intact nervous systems, to learn it. Look at how, despite decades of
research to develop robots that walk, they remain primitive, often
comical. Perhaps the long-injured will enjoy some partial return, some
movement in the hands or chest or even legs. That would be a
considerable boon. But it is far from the fantasy Reeve promotes:
walking, i.e., restoration to preinjury status.
Reeve believes restoration is just around the corner. Fine. I have no
quarrel with a man who wants to believe that. If he needs that to get
through his day, who am I to disabuse him of his fantasies?
But Reeve insists on parading his fantasies in public with the express
purpose of converting others to them. In his public pronouncements and
now in his disgracefully misleading Super Bowl ad, he is evangelizing
the imminent redemption. He goes so far as to criticize those who
believe otherwise.
“The biggest problem, actually,” he told Good Morning America the day
after the commercial aired, “is people who’ve been in a chair for a very
long time, because in order to survive psychologically they’ve had to
accept ‘O.K., I’m going to spend my life in a chair.’”
In Reeve’s view, reality is a psychological crutch. His propaganda to
that effect undermines those—particularly the young and newly
injured—who are struggling to face reality, master it and make a life
for themselves from their wheelchairs.
Odder still is Reeve’s belief that people in wheelchairs don’t dream
enough about getting out of them. (Hence the $2 million ad.) On the
contrary. The problem is that some—again, the newly devastated young
especially—dream about it too much.
When I was injured, I had a roommate in my four-bed ward who was making
no effort to continue his education or plan for a new career. One day he
told me why: “I’m going to wait seven years for a cure. Then I’m going
to kill myself.”
The false optimism Reeve is peddling is not just psychologically
harmful, cruelly raising hopes. The harm is practical too. The newly
paralyzed young might end up emulating Reeve, spending hours on end
preparing their bodies to be ready to walk the day the miracle cure
comes, much like the millenarians who abandon their homes and sell their
worldly goods to await the Rapture on a mountaintop. These kids should
instead be spending those hours reading, studying and preparing
themselves for the opportunities in the new world that high technology
has for the first time in history made possible for the disabled.
They can have jobs and lives and careers. But they’ll need to work very
hard at it. And they’ll need to start with precisely the psychological
acceptance of reality that Reeve is so determined to undermine.
If I am wrong, the worst that can happen is that when the miracle comes,
the nonbelievers will find themselves overtrained and overtoughened. But
if Reeve is wrong, what will his dreamers be left with? END
COPYRIGHT © 2000 TIME INC.