A-INTRODUCTION
17
FIG. 6. Profound nutritional deficiency in a case of incomplete traumatic transverse
spinal syndrome below Ti, due to the septic absorption and loss of protein from multiple
sores, and stages of rehabilitation following complete healing of sores.
hospitals, institutions or at home. This group includes paraplegics who have been treated
in so-called general Rehabilitation-Departments, where they form a minority and where
the medical and paramedical staff is so busy dealing with other afflictions that they have
not the time to give paraplegics and tetraplegics the attention necessary to prevent them
from becoming disgruntled and retiring into their disability.
(d) Ex-patients of the Spinal Centre either discharged to their own homes, institu–
tions or settlements are re-admitted for routine check-ups or inpatient treatment for
flare ups of their urinary infection or other afflictions such as hypertension, gastro- or
duodenal ulcers, lung complications, cancer, etc. Some have to be readmitted for treat–
ment of recurrent pressure sores as a result of inadequate care at home or institutions or
due to personal indifference and neglect, in spite of all the instructions they have received
during their initial inpatient treatment at the Centre. Some of our former patients living
at home were admitted to their local hospitals for treatment of acute complications such
as pneumonia or fractures of long bones as a result of an accident but have had to be
readmitted to the Spinal Centre because they developed pressure sores in the local hos–
pital, where they could not receive that specialized care needed day and night during
their acute illness.
THE IMPORTANCE OF TEAM WORK
All this reveals the great multitude of problems the medical and paramedical staff of a
Spinal Centre have to cope with in this multi-disciplinary speciality of medicine and
surgery. The whole rehabilitation of the spinal man represents a composite of acute
treatments and long-term management, which makes this subject on the one hand so
complicated but on the other so fascinating. This can only be solved satisfactorily by
