It is not surprising that we are ill prepared to handle a serious attack from the Internet. In the scenario Wall Street was closed down for a week while the power was turned back on. It would be impossible to calculate the tremendous damage to our economy that would happen if no one could trade on the stock exchange for a week. There would be runs on companies, mutual funds, and probably banks. How many companies would be wiped out when things first started up again? How many workers would find themselves unemployed and their bank accounts emptied because of bank failures. People would have to figure out how to stay alive for months while the feds figured how to pay for all the accounts in banks that were insured. If you do get a check, where do you cash it? What other bank do you truest to open up a new account? Does the postal system even work? There are substantial documents that are super secret that outline COG, or continance of government. These papers outline what to do in the case of a nuclear attack where the federal government is substantially damaged. There are outlines for who is responsible for what and how to ring the economy back on line. Many aspects of that document would have to be implemented if we were to get our country back off the ground again.

How would the disabled fare in this environment? If you are in a hospital situation then you are probably the safest of anyone. Major hospitals would be the first to get power and supplies. But if you are either at home or at a shelter then things are going to get ugly quickly. Everyone saw what happened in Hurricane Katrina at the Superdome where basic supplies were gone and people were living without clean water or sanitary conditions. The government has shown that it is not prepared to deal with a large emergency and that it takes time for groups like the military to get involved and get assets to the area. During that time everyone, especially the disabled must be able to fend for themselves for the better part of a week. Hoping that someone from state or federal government is going to come knocking on your door with food, water and medical supplies is a pipe dream. Those folks that need a nurse to get going in the morning need to make arrangements to have someone stay with them during the storm so that when roads are blocked, power is out and there is no gasoline your nurse is already in the house and can help you immediately. If you require drugs that have to be refrigerated then get a small refrigerator and a few uninterruptible power supplies or a generator to keep the fridge running. Make a spot in your home that can hold food, water and other supplies for a week for each person in your household, including your helpers. That will give you enough time for emergency crews to get power back up and police and fire crews to get things back under control.

How well you fare in an emergency is directly tied to how well you prepared. Those that have generators or UPS systems will find that life without power is more of an inconvenience. Food and water are the most important things you can have and things can get ugly if you run out of either. It is easy to stock up before an emergency and to keep track of dates so things do not go bad. Make sure that you also include manual can openers to open cans of soup. Since electricity may be an issue you should also include a couple of battery powered flashlights and a radio. If you have the budget for it get a battery powered digital television so that you can pick up local stations. This is a good place to start to set up an emergency kit to help you in times of bad weather or national emergency. Either way you should be able to stay at home for 7 to 10 days without food or water to make sure you don’t run out of supplies before emergency crews get a handle on the situation.

Adaptive Driving Devices

http://www.sylacaugahandicap.com/adaptive_devices.htm

 Shows various adaptive devices for driving a car. It does not include the prices of the devices as pricing depends on the vehicle to be installed in.

Toyota Mobility Program

http://www.toyota.com/toyotaSearch/search?keyword=wheelchair&locale=en

Most car manufacturers have programs in place to allow the disabled to drive their products. This page shows the various vehicles that can be converted along with special pricing and rebates that are available. Also note that many states will pay to convert a vehicle as long as it is not more than three years old. There are also companies that will sell used vehicles that are already adapted and ready to go. You save money and get a vehicle that already has the equipment you need.

National Mobility Equipment Dealer Association

www.nmeda.org

This site is for consumers and shows all the different programs that are available to the disabled to get them back on the road. Go to the "Consumer" area and click on the "rebate" section to see what is available in your state. Each has its own programs and money available depending on the level of disability. It is best to get paperwork in early in the year because that is when everyone has their new budget. The sooner you get in line the better chance you have of getting the funding you need to get in that new vehicle or to convert the minivan or other small vehicle.

There have been several attempts to change the way medical care is doled out in the United States but is has been shot down every time. This is the closest that anyone has come to creating a omnibus bill for medical care. While it is not perfect everyone can see that we cannot continue to zoom down the way we are going because Medicare and Social Security are both in big trouble financially speaking. Something has to be done in the next 10 to 15 years or many programs that Americans use to live on after working their entire lives will crash and burn. That does not include all those (and we are talking millions) that depend on those programs because of a catastrophic injury that forced them to be disabled. The disabled usually cannot work anymore and without Social Security would be tossed out on the street (along with their family) and without Medicare would also lose their home because of skyrocketing medical bills. It is not unreasonable for many on Medicare to lose their prescription drug program after 5 or 6 months because of the way the law works and then stop taking their drugs until the next year. Many die of heart attacks or worse because they cannot afford to take the drugs they need to stay alive. It is a scary thing to think about but we all will eventually get to that point as we get old and our bodies give out. So if you think that this does not effect you, give it a few decades and we’ll see how you feel about no programs in place to help with paying the bills. Read up and stay tuned, it is going to be a bumpy ride.

It is sad that these companies are fighting to keep books out of the hands of disabled people across the globe. We all know that knowledge is power and that the better educated a person is t he easier time it will be to find a good job or continue in college. By tightly controlling what books are available to the blind, they are deciding what books the blind should read. The individual no longer has control over what materials they have access t, instead large corporations decide that and put whatever price tags for entry on these products so they can control the disabled. The Library of Congress, Google and the Gutenberg Project all pay  the publishers to convert the books into electronic format so that they will be available to many people including those using electronic book readers and the blind. Those works are then placed in public libraries so that they are available to everyone. Evidently the book publishers believe that libraries are really large groups involved in stealing all of their works by making them available to everyone without charging them a fee.

The disabled are usually at the bottom of the economic ladder, trying to live off of Social Security Disability payments and eking out a life for themselves and their families. Most do not have money to purchase books at $15-$50 a pop, especially for technical or college texts. By making these available in formats like Daisy the blind can keep up with the latest trends and make themselves useful to the market for jobs. By locking them out of millions of titles available around the world you lock them out of works that everyone who is not disabled can access. This creates a group of underserved that can only access what companies deem they need to read rather than letting the consumers make that decision. What books and literature should we not allow the blind to read? How about the Jewish population or African Americans? Are we hiding books that show how the have been systematically discriminated against? Is this how we keep the disabled from ever moving up the economic food chain? 

The fight against allowing people to read what they want is a scary idea that needs to be stopped. The free press needs to publish stories on what is happening to the blind so that advocacy groups can step in to protect the rights of the disabled in the United States and Europe. Wile you finish this article, think about what books you should not be allowed to read by corporate america.

Research points people in new and strange directions, and it is great to see that work has moved forward in helping people suffering from fibromyalgia. There are probably other areas of the body where receptors are found by not well understood. Pain and how the brain receives and processes that data is an area that needs more research. Certain classes of pain drugs are known to work on pain receptors or areas of the brain that receive that information, but exactly how the interaction works is a mystery. That needs to be cleared up if we are to get better pain medications that only work on the receptors we want and not on muscle receptors like we have now with drugs like Oxycontin. While this drug is a strong pain killer it also dramatically slows down the bowel forcing the patient to take addition drugs to keep their lower intestines working properly. There are other contraindications for these drugs that patients need to work with that would be nice if the pain drugs were better aimed at where the damage is.

There are devices that can be implanted near the spine with either electrodes or needles that are implanted in the damaged area of the spine. Electrical stimulation or drugs are sent to the location at regular intervals and can be adjusted by either the doctor or the patient. In this way the drugs are sent to only the place that they are needed and the patient can stay relatively clear minded from the drugs and since a smaller dose is used the bowel is now as effected. While these are very effective the patient must go through an operation and recovery, both of which can have issues of infection that require more drugs and therapy. Many people find these implants to be very effective and work better than the drugs they were taking and do a better job of handling pain spike because the patient can control extra doses if a problem crops up. Normally addition drugs are taken by mouth and can take anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour to become effective which is a long time to wait for pain relief. 

 The disabled are not usually thought of when designing a game, so it is great to see someone create a database of games and who can play them based upon ability. Perhaps if the disabled were to send letters to game companies like Electronic Arts and let them know that we buy games and would like them to keep us in mind when they design a new one. That we are customers that spend money like everyone else and that a little bit of work on their part to make games easier for the disabled to play could translate into more money and profit. In this way we all win, the game company gains a new player and the disabled person has something that they can get some joy off of rather than just surfing the Internet. It can be difficult to find games that match up with different medical problems, and it is not fair to expect that shoot-em up games or fast driving games are going to be easily played by those that are quadriplegic. We have to expect that all games will not fit everyone and that lawsuits will just turn the game companies away from us when we want them to think of us as a group that wants to play.

When I was first injured I was still able to play most arcade games well. However, after complications from CRPS (a nasty pain generator from spinal cord injuries) I can only play turn based games or card games. That is ok for me because I can still do fun things and just have to change what I look for in a game. The moral of the story here is to pick the game that fits with what we can do and not expect miracles from game companies or console producers. Most controllers have tiny joysticks and lots of small buttons to press. No quads need apply to those controllers and the games that use them. However not all consoles are the same – Nintendo has changed the game with their WII console. The WII controller is a dramatic change in game controllers and may be the first to be disabled friendly. By allowing the user to swing or twist the controller the gamer can duplicate the swing of a tennis racquet or the turn of a car steering wheel. This makes for a fun experience that does not require hitting a zillion buttons to make a game work. Hopefully the other game makers will take the WII controller and expand on it so that everyone, including the disabled will have an easier and fun time playing games.

From a single device you can now access the Internet, have telephone support and move your wheelchair around. The company did not say so in the article but they should also be working on an application that let Dynamic Controls know about problkems so they could set up a technician to come out and fix the chair. Since all the new iphones have GPS hardware built in, it would be easy to determine where the user was at in case they needed immediate help or would be staying at that location until hardware support could come by. Integration of hardware into the wheelchair is about time as it now makes it easy to access the chair whether the user is in it or not. Many times my wheelchair was moved by hospital staff and I had to repeatedly call to et them to move the chair back so I could get to it. Rather than waiting for the nursing staff to get around, by using the iphone control, I could have moved the chair myself and accessed the movie or whatever else I needed. Any time that disabled people are given more control over their lives and more mobility it is a good day and that is the case here. It would be great if the interface hardware would be easily installed on any wheelchair that was powered. those that already have a wheelchair could now run it from their iphone.

The camera was not noted to be used on the iphone but depending on where the charger was placed, the camera could be turned on  and used as a video camera if the user wanted to show his friends where he was. IT would be also useful to get directions and show where you were so a business or friend could talk you in from where you were. With the hardware and software built into the iphone, it is almost limitless what can be done to integrate it into a wheelchair. Here hopes that other vendors use the same connection and docking station to reduce the cost of smart controls on the wheelchair. Rather than harging for a custom controller, the iphone could be used to control the wheelchair from the screen or from voice if the user was a quad. Plus it would be easy to add new features by merely downloading a new applet rather than having to install a whole new controller.

One would think that this was the script from a “B” movie in Hollywood, but states all over the country are debating the use of the New York protocols to determine what to do during an emergency and how to ration supplies that run low during a virus outbreak. However, public opinion has been strongly against any kind of rationing like this, and officials have worked hard to keep the public out of meetings that discuss these protocols. Our only safety net is that most states have not implemented this plan as law and most are worried what would happen to public opinion if they did put it into law. While officials are trying to state that this is for the national good and that work must be done to make sure medical care is available neglect to explain how this is going to occur. No one in any meetings to discuss the New York Protocols are willing to say that the will take ventilators and other lifesaving medical equipment from a person merely because they are disabled. We have not heard of something this sinister since the Nazi plan to rid the Reich of people that were “broken or not whole”. People that were forced to live in nursing homes because of disabilities were carted off to the same killing centers that the Jews were sent to. This law appears to allow the state to do the same type of thing under the veil of doctors and hospitals trying to give care to those that desperately need it.

People that live in states that frequently have disasters like Florida, Louisiana and California need to look carefully and see what their state officials are working on in this arena. If your state is looking to implement the New York Protocols you need to call everyone you know to put a stop to it. If this is allowed to become law then the governor of your state can decide at will that the disabled do not deserve to live and will be denied medical care that they may need to survive because others are felt to have a better chance to live. The control of life at this level is disgusting and it is sad that any doctors would be willing to put time and effort to make this a reality. No one should have the basic right to control who lives and who dies without having the family involved.

It is sad that the hospitals do so little for the disabled before they are released back into the community. My hospital was more interested in getting me signed up for wheelchair basketball than getting me back behind the wheel. How am I supposed to get to basketball if I don’t have transportation? There are groups that can pick you up and drop you off, but they don’t show up lots of times and leave you with no way to get home. Taxis are very hard to find because many don’t want to deal with someone that is disabled. Who wants to deal with tossing a wheelchair into the trunk along with any packages that were purchased at the store. Then they have to help you back into your wheelchair and into your home. Even if you are lucky enough to get a taxi driver that will help you, it will cost you a small mint as taxis are expensive. Public transportation can be used but many times drivers won’t stop for you or the equipment is broken. We have written many times about problems with public transportation including problems in Los Angeles and England.

We have to learn to be self sufficient so that we don’t have to deal with useless public transportation. The whole idea here is the be able to do everything you used to do to get back as much of your life as possible. Transportation and travel are a big part of getting out of the house and getting back to work. If you are stuck at home then you are a prisoner of your disability and that is no way to live. No one wants to live the rest of their days sitting in front of the television or computer because those are the only windows to the outside world that you have access to. The longer you wait the harder it is going to be to get your license back and to get your car updated. There is a mental part of this that will dig you into depression quickly if you cannot get out of your home. That just compounds the issues so that nothing is ever accomplished. Get back to work, back to school, or whatever makes your life worth living.

With all the different fronts working to get spinal cord injuries treatable, it is great to see success that could potentially help millions. Work outside spinal cord research has been done in the past to get computers to talk directly to the brain. Problems have cropped up in wire-cell interfaces where the cells did not live long when connected to the wiring. Considerable work has been done in this area and there are several spinal cord patients that have wiring implants that are connected to computers so the patients can do certain activities. One patient can use his brain to move a mouse cursor on a screen and to select letters to write. Other activities including moving a wheelchair by just thinking about it is presently in the works. It is just a matter of time before computers and the interfaces to the brain become sophisticated enough to move major muscle groups smoothly and safely. This would allow the quadriplegic to either move their own arm or leg, or move an artificial limb instead. Either would be a big positive change to a disabled person to be able to grab and move things around in their environment using just their brain.

The whole reasoning behind this is to give people their lives back. To be able to do daily tasks without the need of a nurse or home aide. While loved ones think of these tasks as something they must do because it is their responsibility, they steadily burn out over time and eventually find it frustrating to keep doing daily tasks over and over again. Computers can help to do these tasks and the nurse or aide can move on to other things like driving the disabled person to the store or to help them ride around the block. It would be great to be able to grab a glass to drink or a knife and fork to eat dinner by yourself without someone having to feed  you. Every daily task that you give back to the disabled person is like giving them a part of their lives back that was stolen when they were injured. The mental aspect of this could dramatically increase the level of life that they live making them happier and more useful members of society. That is something truly worth working on.