"Polio's Painful Legacy"

This classic 1985 New York Times article presents an in-depth look at what was then newly named as "post-polio syndrome." Author Joy Horowitz interviews patients doctors, therapists, early disability advocates (many themselves having polio) to characterize the emerging reality of polio's late effects.

Physicians who had never treated a polio patient before began to hear complaints of extreme fatigue, muscle weakness or loss in previously "good limbs." Introducing post-polio syndrome and possibly, post-polio muscular atrophy, as symptomatic of earlier polio disability, the author interviews such notables on the topic as Dr. Lauro Halstead from the Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Frederick Maynard from the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Center at the University of Michigan, Dr. Stuart Raper who worked at Warm Springs Rehabilitation Institute when Franklin D. Roosevelt underwent therapy there, and neurologist Marinos Dalakas. All bring experienced perspectives and opinions about this resurfacing of muscle weakness and fatigue and what this means to the patients clinically, physically, psychologically.

Early polio advocate Mrs. Gini Laurie, the editor of The Rehabilitation Gazette based in St. Louis (and now Post-Polio Health International) organized the first international conference on post-polio issues in Chicago in 1981. The support groups that sprung up and disseminated information became more and more important as the "overachievers" who might have been in denial about the second wave of weakness began to face the physical and psychological reality of post-polio syndrome-- and began to adjust lifestyles to cope with their new "normal."