On April 23 of that year, Burns, then 21, had a gorgeous girlfriend, a lightning-fast motorcycle and a good shot at a job as a cop in Detroit. But on his motorcycle that day, as in life, Burns was in too high of a gear as he barreled toward Mt. Hood just east of Estacada, Ore. By night's end, he would be paralyzed from the chest down as his body and bike lay twisted and broken at the edge of the highway.

After a month in a coma and years of rehabilitation, Burns' life shifted gears again, when he became a volunteer for ThinkFirst, a national brain and spinal cord injury prevention program with its Oregon chapter at Oregon Health & Science University. As a VIP, or Voice for Injury Prevention, Burns now speaks to Portland-area students about the dangers of high-speed living.

"When something happens to you, it's not just you who it affects," Burns said he tells elementary, middle and high school students from his wheelchair. "You don't see the aftermath of this person's head being split wide open. You don't see the grieving family. You don't see the lives that are changed."

Such messages appear to be working, according to a review of the ThinkFirst program in this month's Journal of Neurosurgery. Researchers in the Department of Neurology, OHSU School of Medicine, examined the ThinkFirst National Injury Prevention Foundation, created in 1986, and found it made significant strides in preventing injury by combining education with legislative initiatives, community-wide safety programs and a large public presence nationwide. The study says the program demonstrates the importance of injury prevention as a valuable component of the nation's medical system.

"We wanted to see if ThinkFirst was an efficacious program," said Rae Rosenberg, ThinkFirst Oregon program coordinator and lead study author. "The article shows that ThinkFirst significantly improves knowledge of prevention among program participants."

And that may be affecting the
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Contact: Jonathan Modie
modiej@ohsu.edu
503 494-8231
Oregon Health & Science University
11-May-2005

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