# Is it common practice to offer amputation to patients recently suffering from a spinal cord injury? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 21, 2011, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-common-practice-to-offer-amputation-to-patients-recently-suffering-from-a-spinal-cord-injury/603676 "2011-11-21T19:53:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ambivalid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a5b964/32.png) [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2011, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-common-practice-to-offer-amputation-to-patients-recently-suffering-from-a-spinal-cord-injury/603676/41 "2011-11-28T01:46:51Z")
> [@brossa](#): > > But those statistics are an artifact of the underlying patient population, not of the procedure itself. If your diabetes or peripheral vascular disease has progressed to the point where you have gangrene and need an amputation, you have a higher risk of dying even with the amputation because you are at a high risk of dying, period. If overwhelming sepsis from some superbug has landed you in the ICU and shock has killed off your legs, etc. etc. You are poor protoplasm. Amputation is not typically performed on otherwise healthy people except in the case of trauma, in which event the complication rate is lower, as the reference notes. You would expect the best amputation outcomes in patients who were having purely elective procedures on an otherwise healthy limb: not because of acute trauma like a thresher accident or because of chronic or acute illness like diabetes or sepsis. I see. Thank you. ---
**Author:** ![Bear\_Nenno](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bear_nenno/32/3358_2.png) [@Bear\_Nenno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bear_Nenno)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2011, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-common-practice-to-offer-amputation-to-patients-recently-suffering-from-a-spinal-cord-injury/603676/42 "2011-11-29T02:25:57Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > OK, Bear\_nenno, I don’t want to dumop on you but this is flat nonsense. Work is already being done on repairing nerves, including the spine. Regrowing limbs is something we can barely conceive of, and then only in complete fiction. First of all, I said “and/ **or** regrowing”. The major point was “reattaching”. When we can reconnect severed nerves so that they function properly, attaching doner limbs _will_ be trivial. Second of all, work is _also_ being done on regrowing limbs, including the use of extracellular matrices, stem cells, a whatever we’re getting from salamander research. So your claim of “flat nonsense” is well… just that. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2011, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-common-practice-to-offer-amputation-to-patients-recently-suffering-from-a-spinal-cord-injury/603676/43 "2011-11-29T04:20:23Z")
To return to the OP, it can hardly be common if it happens at all. Think of all the people you see using wheel chairs and try to recall any who were legless. It happens obviously but seems rare. However, I recall two different articles about a person with one paralyzed, perhaps withered, leg who had it amputated because they felt it would improve their quality of life. One (in England I believe) learned to ride a bike using an artificial leg after his amputation, presumably below the knee. He was unable to do it before. The other, a young woman living, IIRC, in Ottawa was just fed up needing crutches and felt she could learn to walk on an artificial leg. You might think that a leg brace might have done the job. Come to think of it, I can’t recall the last time I saw anyone with a leg brace. They used to be quite common, before the polio vaccine. Come to think of the last two were musicians who performed at the Montreal Symphony and I know for a fact that they had both had polio. ---
**Author:** ![Cinnamon\_Imp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@Cinnamon\_Imp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cinnamon_Imp)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2011, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-common-practice-to-offer-amputation-to-patients-recently-suffering-from-a-spinal-cord-injury/603676/44 "2011-12-07T15:51:09Z")
Not a spinal cord injury but I just read [this](http://traumaqueen.net/?p=1882)about a lady, presumably in Edinburgh, going to some extremes to get an amputation _shudder_ (possibly NSFW) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-common-practice-to-offer-amputation-to-patients-recently-suffering-from-a-spinal-cord-injury/603676.md?page=2)