Understanding spinal injury
The spinal cord is like a highway of nerves and its job is to relay messages from the brain to the body and back again. Damage to this information highway means the messages sent from the brain are not received by the body (and vice versa), resulting in the loss of feeling, function and movement in certain parts of the anatomy.
Spinal cord injuries are classified in two ways:
- how badly the spinal cord has been damaged (complete or incomplete)
- the specific location of the injury on the spinal cord
Spinal injuries can happen in lots of ways including road traffic accidents, a fall from a horse, through medical negligence, during birth or in an accident at work to name a few.