March is National Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month. Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare is the world-renowned leader in the treatment of cerebral palsy. We enhance the lives of individuals who have cerebral palsy and promote their well-being by improving diagnosis, management, and care through research, innovation, and collaboration. The Harkness family shares their story of why selective dorsal rhizotomy (SDR) surgery at Gillette was the best choice for their daughter.

March is National Cerebral Palsy (CP) Awareness Month and Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare is one of the world’s leading centers for cerebral palsy diagnosis, treatment and research. We enhance the lives of individuals who have cerebral palsy and are advocates for CP patients and research.

A new book edited by Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare orthopedic surgeon, Tom Novacheck, MD, and clinical scientist, Michael Schwartz, PhD, is intended to be a resource for health care providers and scientists to improve the lives of people who have cerebral palsy and mobility challenges. “We hope this new book is a blueprint for the next five years of research and clinical care to help people who have cerebral palsy,” Novacheck says.

Gillette Children's Specialty Healthcare has launched a new resource to help parents of children who have complex, rare or traumatic conditions. The first book released by the new Gillette Children’s Healthcare Press is Spastic Diplegia—Bilateral Cerebral Palsy and it’s written by Lily Collison, an Ireland-based author and the mother of a Gillette patient.

"Every step Sophia takes is a testament to the countless dedicated individuals who made it possible," says her mother, Susan Slinkard. Sophia and her family traveled from Arkansas to Minnesota for several major surgeries aimed at reducing Sophia's spasticity.

There are few moments in life as exciting and anxiety inducing as the day you have your first child, but for Andrew Bailey and his wife, Amanda, things were a bit more complicated. Amanda was home in Connecticut getting ready for her baby shower. Andrew, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, was in Seattle for an away game.

After two orthopedic surgeries, both informed by gait analysis, Eliza's now pain-free and able to pursue her passion for musical theater and dance.

During his career, pediatric orthopedic surgeon Jim Gage, MD, brought gait analysis into clinical practice and transformed the approach to caring for children who have cerebral palsy. Gage received prestigious national recognition for his work in 2016.

We recently chatted with orthopedic surgeon Tom Novacheck, MD, director of our James R. Gage Center for Gait and Motion Analysis, in honor of the center's 30th anniversary.

For children like Ava who live in greater Minnesota or outside the state, appointments at Gillette can involve hours of drive time and nights spent in a hotel. All that can add up. Meet Ava and learn how Gillette is helping families like hers by expanding its telemedicine services.

For 30 years, Steven Koop, MD, has believed that all of medicine is about "Someone who says, 'Help,' and someone in the other chair to say, 'That's my work. To help you.'"

Born a micro preemie weighing less than one pound, Ava came to Gillette when she began missing milestones. See how far this active 9-year-old has come as a result of treatments informed by gait and motion analysis data.

At Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare, we understand that choosing a fellowship program is a difficult and important decision. So, we sat down with two of our current Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine fellows to talk about how they made their decision, why they ultimately chose Gillette, and having been here, what they think now?

Every parent wants their child to be healthy, but that isn’t always the case. The reality is that as many as one in about 325 parents will have a child who has a complex medical condition such as cerebral palsy, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC also says about one in six children will have some type of developmental disability.