No abstract

THE introduction of electronically controlled data processing machines has greatly simplified the recording and collation of information and this statistical method is being increasingly used in medicine. Medical records contain a vast amount of detail and considerable time and energy can be spent in a search through these records to obtain information for research or as a guide to the treatment of future patients. Guttmann (1953) has stressed the need for international agreement with regard to statistical work on paraplegics to ensure proper comparison in the future. Inter national agreement on so complicated a subject may be hard to obtain and, for some time, each centre will continue to use its own methods. The method described below is similar to that used in the British limb-fitting service and as described by Campbell, Noall and Hopkins (1964) at the Scientific Exhibition of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons in Chicago. It has been in use at Edenhall for the past year. The data for all new cases can be recorded in a matter of minutes before the patient's discharge and work is slowly progressing in the recording of data relating to all former patients. Accuracy in recording is absolutely essential as a machine can only reflect the accuracy of the material fed into it and, for this purpose, cross-checking by a medical colleague is highly desirable.

149from the hand-shoulder syndrome following trauma in people over the age of forty. The only reason I raise this point is the simple expediency of hydrocortisone injections into the shoulder capsule often unfreezes what in reality is an unfreezing process, pericapsulitis is in fact a self-resolving process but it may last something of the order of 18 months. The reason for treating is that the muscle contraction and the inability to use physio therapy will finally freeze the shoulder to the side, unless you can persist with as much active movement as the patient has or as much passive movement as the physiotherapist can permit him. The other little point about that is that some years ago in the develop ment of the hand-shoulder syndrome as a post-traumatic effect, many orthopa:dic surgeons were inclined towards a sympathectomy with terribly disappointing results and, no doubt, the same would apply in the treatment of the same condition arising as a result of cervical cord lesions.