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This is very encouraging.

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I've thought about that football player a bit too. My understanding is that they use some extreme cooling to keep as many nerves as possible from being killed by the initial inflammation. Long story short, one of my crazy cures is that we all should be sleeping with contraptions that freeze our heads at night

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My feeling is that cooling would trump steroids in that it seems less disruptive to the body. I look at it like beta blockers effecting the autonomic nervous system.

Again in my fantasies we'd be able to detect inflammation levels to a much higher degree then we can now, and administer cooling/steroids on demand like diabetics monitor insulin levels.

I usually entertain these thoughts as: what if saving the neurons of one person was the most important event on the planet? How far could we push monitoring and treatment of a single individual if resources were unlimited? These are my deep thoughts before I conk out and drool on the pillow.

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What they did for the football player (Everett-Buff Bills) was that they immediately, right in the ambulance while on the field, started cooling him down with a cold saline infusion which limited the initial swelling and subsequent damage from the bodies reaction to the swelling. After operating to repair the broken neck they then did use massive quantities of steroids. This all did work for him, but it was after a traumatic event.

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I just hope that we are not the only ones wondering if there could be some implications for other conditions. They actually had a similar story on the show Trauma last week where a skateboarder suffered a traumatic spinal injury and the paramedic gave him the cold saline infusion to stop the inflammation as much as possible. It got me thinking and I'm not even scientifically minded. Guess we'll see if anything more comes of it.