Last year, I watched in horror as Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett suffered a severe spinal injury in the first game of the NFL season. After nearly dying on the field, then receiving a series of grim prognoses, Everett eventually regained the ability to walk on his own. Despite the positive outcome for Everett, it still ended his career. What he suffered was exactly the type of injury the Pro-Neck-Tor could prevent.

When you strike something head-on, like a football player or the end boards of a hockey rink, the stresses placed on your neck can approximate those in a car crash. If you're wearing a helmet, it prevents the force from affecting your skull, but it stops your head's movement suddenly. The force is transferred to the neck and spine. This leads to burst fractures and severe dislocation of the cervical spine. Damage to the spinal cord leads to paralysis. The Pro-Neck-Tor (let's get it out of the way and just acknowledge how horrible the name is) solves this problem by incorporating an inner and outer helmet shell and a pivot point.

As your head impacts something at a head-on angle with enough force, the pivot swings the inner shell forward. The outer shell hits the object while your head stays with the inner shell. The pivoting motion swings your head down and diffuses the force. Testing shows a reduction in forces acting on the neck by up to 72 percent. You can watch a pretty cool video that shows how it works at the Pro-Neck-Tor website. Image by: University of British Columbia.

New Helmet May Significantly Reduce Forces To Neck During Head-first Impact. [Science Daily]

Heart Surgery - Open heart surgery hasn't simply improved since 1948. Back then, it wasn't even possible. Before heart and lung bypass machines, doctors cooled the patient with ice (pictured above) to get a few seconds when they could work on the heart without causing death. Now we can repair and even replace entire structures within the heart, or transplant the heart itself.

Reconstructive Surgery - Microsurgery is the key to successfully reconnecting or rebuilding damaged body parts. Joining the tiny blood vessels speeds healing and makes grafts assimilate better. Now we can repair areas damaged by tumors or injuries with skin, muscle and bone from other parts of the body.

Outpatient Surgery - We have become so good at certain procedures that what used to require a two-week hospital stay (and all the expense and discomfort that entails) now doesn't even require an overnight visit. From the point of view of both patients and hospital administrators, the benefit to the bottom line has had a huge impact on medical care.

Cochlear Implants - The lives of people with certain types of deafness have been vastly improved by these devices, which are essentially bionic ears. By sending audio information as electrical signals through the cochlea and into the auditory nerve, a cochlear implant allows someone who may have previously heard very little to make out speech and other sounds in quiet environments.

Specialization - The typical doctor of 1948 was a general practitioner or generalist surgeon who treated a wide variety of medical problems, but was not necessarily an expert in any of them. Today, doctors are branched into fine specialties, allowing for greater expertise and more intense research into certain areas. Many of these advances would not have happened without increased specialization. Image by: National Institutes of Health.

A 60-year revolution in surgery. [BBC News]