DailyDirt: With Super Healing Powers
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Time can heal some wounds, and technology can sometimes speed things up a bit. But regenerative medicine could really help to improve our health if we can re-grow body parts on demand. Here are just a few links on getting our bodies to heal themselves.
- Scientists have found lingering olfactory receptors in unexpected places — such as the skin — where these receptors may play a role in healing processes. Sandalwood oil which is often used in aromatherapy can bind to skin receptors and trigger skin cells to divide (and possibly help repair damage as part of a healing mechanism). [url]
- Several years ago, a man accidentally cut off the tip of his finger and discovered that cells from the lining of a pig’s bladder encouraged his fingertip to grow back within a few weeks. Regenerative medicine researchers have been studying the extra cellular matrix as a way to stimulate the re-growth of organ tissues and limbs. [url]
- Children under two years old have a natural ability to re-grow their fingertips without any special treatment at all. It only works if a little bit of the fingernail remains, and people lose this regenerative ability as they mature. There is some optimism that studying this phenomenon (which also happens in mice paws) will lead to an advance in medicine to re-grow arbitrary organs and help people recover from intractable diseases. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) BestNetTech post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: extra cellular matrix, finger tip, healing, health, olfactory receptors, regenerative medicine, skin, wounds
Comments on “DailyDirt: With Super Healing Powers”
I knew a guy who had a fingertip re-grow after he got his hand caught in the wrong part of a door closing.
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or so he claimed.
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I once accidentally sliced off about 1/4″ of a fingertip with an exacto knife once. It had completely regrown in a few months.
Several years ago, a man accidentally cut off the tip of his finger and discovered that cells from the lining of a pig’s bladder encouraged his fingertip to grow back within a few weeks.
That’s amazing! Too bad you will NEVER hear about this process ever again. Like dozens of other medical “breakthroughs” that I’ve heard about over the years, it will disappear without a trace.
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most likely because clinical trials takes “forever”, otoh this was 6 year ago so…
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most likely because clinical trials takes “forever”, otoh this was 6 year ago so…
More than a decade ago, I read an article about a new treatment for heart disease. A patient had a very badly damaged heart and the doctors said he wouldn’t live long without a transplant. One doctor had a radical idea. He disconnected the heart from the circulatory system so that it no longer had to pump the blood and hooked up a small, external pump to replace it. This is allowed the heart to rest.
According to the article, after one or two months, the heart had healed to almost normal. The pump was removed, the heart reconnected and the patient was pronounced healthy. It was speculated that this procedure could reduce the need for heart transplants down to a fraction of what it was and that it would save countless lives.
Ever heard of anyone being treated this way?