That's how the future looks right now for Lily Clark, who has just been fitted with a brace that covers her entire torso. Although it's cute, patterned with little elephants and lions, it's still a brace that restricts her movement and sometimes pinches.

When she was 3 months old, her mother, Guenever Parsley, a nurse at the U., noticed the curve in her baby's spine. Subsequent tests confirmed Parsley's suspicions.

Mild curvature, 10 degrees or less, doesn't require treatment. A brace is typically considered if the curve is 20 to 30 degrees. That's the range that Lily was in, although hers "jumped" from the low 20s to almost 35 degrees. With a 40- to 50-degree curve, surgery is likely; above that it's mandatory.

Doctors try to keep treatment as unintrusive as possible. Frankly, Braun said, it's pretty brutal, a lot to put a child or teen through. Fortunately, it's improving. Braun did the first minimally invasive scoliosis surgery three years ago, using a small camera to see.

It would be easier to choose a treatment if you knew what was on the line. "The diagnosis is not always clear. We follow tons who never need treatment, but we have to be diligent."

Although a brace isn't intrusive, it's uncomfortable. And it can have psychological impact. The numbers aren't a fun sell, either.

About half of those who wear a brace 23 hours a day, years on end, will maintain their curve so that it doesn't get worse. That's a success story. The brace doesn't permanently reshape the spine. Rather, it straightens it enough so that when it eventually is removed and the curvature begins to return, it just goes back to where it started or very slightly worse, preventing massive deformity. Another quarter will get worse, even with the brace. The final 25 percent would not have gotten worse, even without the brace.

But who fits which category is a mystery until treatment is tried.

Those numbers are clearly disheartening to Parsley and Bert Clark, Lily's dad, who have lots of questions. At what point, they wonder, do you consider using staples to guide the spine or surgery or some other treatment?

Doctors used to fuse spines on very young children, who still had a lot of growing left to do. Decades ago, Braun tells Parsley and Clark, doctors didn't see the long-term ramifications. A fused spine stops lengthening as the child grows, but organs like the heart and lungs continue to grow. Surgeons years ago would fuse long sections of the spine, then congratulate themselves that they had straightened it. It was the pulmonologist who, years later, provided the follow-up. A child fused at 6 became a 16-year-old on oxygen who died in her 20s, if she lived that long.

That's a problem well recognized and avoided nowadays, said Dr. James Ogilvie, scoliosis expert and surgeon at Shriners Hospital. "Many children have serious deformity before age 10, and those you do not want to fuse."