Madonna’s Daughter – Lourdes Ciccone Leon
Lourdes Ciccone Leon is the daughter of pop icon Madonna. She helped to design her mom’s “Material Girl” line of clothes for teenage girls and has become a fashion icon in her own right. Lourdes even performs alongside her mother as a backup dancer on her musical tour. She has been seen wearing the Spinecor brace, a brace often prescribed for scoliosis.
The SpineCor System was designed to treat idiopathic scoliosis for curves greater than 15º but not curves greater than 30º. It is generally not used for non idiopathic scoliosis. The brace is worn for 20 hours per day and must be worn while sleeping. The length of treatment is always a minimum of 18 months with the average for adolescent scoliosis being 24 months. Juvenile scoliosis cases require even longer treatment times.
Compliance can be difficult for children and adolescents alike due to both physical and emotional discomfort while wearing the brace. This is especially true for teenage girls with scoliosis. Adolescence can be a difficult time for most teenagers and a scoliosis brace can add to feelings of insecurity and of being different. These feelings can lead to patients not wearing the brace for the specified 20 hours. For example, they may not want to been seen wearing the brace while changing for gym, they may take it off for parties or even in the summer months to spend the day at the beach, a pool, or waterpark and this can add up to many hours not spent in the scoliosis brace.
The Spinecor brace was designed with belts, straps and pads as an alternative to the rigid braces in hopes that there would be better compliance among patients. However, a 2010 study found compliance among patients using this brace to be just as limited as those using the traditional more rigid ones. Also, another study conducted in 2008 on the clinical efficacy of the Spinecor brace found the failure rate to be slightly higher than with other traditional braces. With bracing in general, the benefits of the brace are lost once the patient is no longer wearing the scoliosis brace. The basic principle behind the Strauss method is that it is better to retrain the brain to “learn’ how to hold the spine into position than it is to force the spine into position. Cobb Angle is merely a symptom of the scoliosis, not the cause, and if treatment is only focused on the symptoms of any condition, you will never provide any real benefit to the patient.