Spinal Cord Injury Persuasive Speech Outline

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Injured Americans and Our Money-Hungry Government
Thesis: Without the gossamer, yet necessary spinal cord, all of mankind would legitimately be lifeless. The spinal cord is a bundle of nerve fibers that is interconnected with the brain and resides beneath the vertebral column; functioning as the fundamental pathway responsible for movement and sensation. In unfortunate instances, the spinal cord can be injured; leaving people physically incompetent and giving doctors no choice but to tell their patients that they will be immobile or confined to assistive devices for the rest of their lives—which needs to come to an end. There’s a cure that needs to be found, and the government needs to fund for it. 
Introductory to funding: Whether the spinal …show more content…

Researchers purposely began paralyzing mice by giving them contusions (a type of spinal cord injury caused by great impact to the spinal cord) and injected the sites of damage with a plethora of different stems cells in combination with intensive therapy. This aids in producing a nerve-insulating substance called myelin that can lead to functional improvements in animals with spinal cord injury. Overtime, helplessly paralyzed mouse legs were slowly but surely becoming mobile—which is what led to the current trials we have being tested on spinal cord injury patients today, except testing with mice is undeniably less expensive considering the fact that a mouse’s body being fumbled with doesn’t compare to the significance of a human being who sustained an accidental spinal cord injury. On top of that, these trials have the potential to make “spinal cord injury” a term of the past, but that dream to many could be highly unlikely if medical research facilities don't receive a considerable amount of funding. The average cost of a clinical trial involving stem cells in the U.S varies from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, which could leave a great majority of those victimized by paralysis vulnerable to feeling hopeless as their perpetual medical bills continue to …show more content…

In the case of six hundred and seventy-five veterans recruited from the VHA, or the Veterans Health Administration (for SCI facilities), direct medical fees costed a whopping $14.47 million or $21,450 per patient. This is aside from the fees that came after in regards to assistive devices, medication, and housing—and its not only affecting our veterans, but also hundreds of thousands of our Americans today. It’s evidently a lot of cents and dollars, and it truly is hurting our economy, but who’s really at fault for an accidental injury? Is it far too abstract to say that if the government contributed more into medical research organizations and brought researchers closer to a cure, that they would truly be doing themselves a favor (aside from changing the lives of over three-hundred thousand

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