Science that cures
So much medical news seems to chronicle the many ways the health industry can make us miserable, but here is a medical advance I'd classify in the genuine miracle-cure category: surgical techniques to reattach nerves and tendons so that people with paralyzed arms and hands can regain function there. It's not like walking again, but what a difference use of one's hands makes.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Journalists prefer to talk about side effects.
surgical techniques to reattach nerves and tendons
We were reconnecting neurons and dinky nerves that consisted only of a (very) few neurons when I was in psych grad school all those years ago. There were two key factors to that. One was getting to the severed neurons quickly enough that they hadn't all died first. The other was channeling the regrowing neuron bundle--the nerve--so that its component neurons didn't just wander afield, instead guiding that growth so each severed neuron reconnected to its own neuron and not to another in the bundle. And a third: we couldn't guarantee getting the individual connections among one neuron's axon tree mapped to the connecting neurons' [sic] dendritic trees exactly correctly, so there always was a period of retraining. Doing this with major nerves is, indeed, a seriously miraculous advance.
I'm still waiting for the ability to effectively repair tendons, not just transfer them. When I blew up my shoulder some years ago--all three tendons that create the shoulder joint were completely torn through--the doc told me I had three repair choices: staple or sew the tendons back together, and expect the repair to last maybe as long as five years before the repair shredded their way along the tendon fibers and let the tendons come apart again; run a couple of rivets from my collar bone to my shoulder blade and pin the joint in place, and expect that repair to last maybe five years before bone growth and aging loosened the rivets and the repair failed; and skip all of that and do nothing. After, all the muscles that surround the joint would let me live a normal life; I just wouldn't have much leverage. The repairs would be useful to extend an athletic career that required throwing things, and the surgery would be expensive.
Tendon repair would be a seriously miraculous advance, for all that tendon transfers are a serious upside.
Eric Hines
Divine healing methods I use do not have "negative side effects".
Post a Comment