Human spinal cord injury: new and emerging approaches to treatment.

The World Health Organization together with the Iceland Ministry of Health and Social Security sponsored a conference entitled 'Human Spinal Cord Injury: New and Emerging Approaches to Treatment' held on May 31-June 2, 2001 in Reykjavik, Iceland. To help catalyze the development of new paradigms to address spinal cord injury, the conference's overall goal was to bring in a diversity of perspectives, ranging from state-of-the-art stem cell biology to the ancient wisdom of Eastern Medicine. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the presentations of the conference's 26 speakers.