More than 4,000 children from around the world are able to take strong or first steps thanks to a doctor at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
Ivy from Australia has made history by becoming the 4,000th patient at St. Louis Children’s Hospital to receive specialized spine surgery to enable her to start walking, which she wasn’t able to do because of her cerebral palsy. Dr. T.S. Park, a neurosurgeon at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, pioneered the surgery to reduce spasticity and improve mobility in children with cerebral palsy. For some children, it means being able to walk unassisted for the first time.
Dr. Park has performed more than 4,000 selective dorsal rhizotomy, or SDR, surgeries over the course of more than three decades on children like Ivy from all over the world – 77 countries around the world and 49 states in the U.S.