14 DAY TRIAL // Bone pains are not fun, especially the ones you wind up with after an injury, but they happen alarmingly often, and they are both a physical stress as well as a mental one due to their presence always inciting the fear that the bone could break again if you try to put more than the tiniest strain on it.
Spine pains and injuries are as serious and worrisome as they come. Especially when all evidence suggests things should be just fine.
Paul Heathcote was brutally assaulted 20 years back and has been complaining of neck pain ever since, much to the bemusement of doctors who could not figure out what the problem was.
The head, shoulders, and arms have been troubling him as well, and his hands have been getting pins and needles too, quite often.
Unwilling to leave things be anymore, he used a CT scan as the basis for a 3D model. The scan covered his shoulders and surrounding area and showed that a piece of his first thoracic vertebra had evidence of an old displaced fracture.
That didn't account for the problems though, so eventually he did a CT scan of his whole cervical spine, uncovering more abnormalities, specifically multiple avulsion fractures and subluxations of his cervical spine.
Unfortunately, it is too late to do anything about them now, so the man has to make do with trying to manage his symptoms better now that he knows what's causing them. It hasn't been working that well though.
It goes to show that 3D printing is having a huge impact in healthcare. If only it was available earlier.
