A COWBOY'S SPINE.

This article focuses on Casey Peterson, a farmer from Saskatchewan, who will travel to China to take part in an experimental cell-transplant procedure aimed at helping spinal cord victims recover at least some mobility. Casey is booked for surgery in Beijing in October 2006--the waiting list for foreigners is long--and his neighbours have begun raising money to help out. Casey wheels around in his motorized chair, pointing out the exercise and rehab equipment that fills two rooms of his farmhouse. He's dressed in the ranch garb he's always worn: blue jeans, jean jacket and a black cowboy hat. Despite being confined to a wheelchair, he looks healthy and surprisingly strong. On his farm, Casey oversees the feeding and care of 100 chuckwagon and saddle horses. He also helps out at his parents' cattle auction business down the road. After his accident, Casey didn't have the lung capacity to do much auctioneering. But he worked with a breathing machine and now he's able to call out the bidding for a few hours at a time, more if he pushes it. None of this is enough for Casey. That's why Casey was excited when his mother, Della, read on the Internet about the procedure being offered by Chinese surgeon Hongyun Huang, which has reportedly helped hundreds of spinal cord victims. Canadian doctors won't endorse the operation, saying its efficacy has yet to be proven through the normal course of animal and clinical trials. As a result, Saskatchewan Health will not pay Huang's $20,000 fee (travel costs are extra). The operation is, in its own way, a bit of cowboy medicine, on the edge of what most neurosurgeons deem acceptable practice. It involves taking olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) from the nasal area of aborted fetuses, cultivating them and then injecting them into sections of the spinal cord near the site of the injury.