

A Practical Talk On Regenerating Our Bodies - todayiamme
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/alan_russell_on_regenerating_our_bodies.html

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todayiamme
I am sorry this is a video, but it is the most amazing video I have ever seen.
I highly recommend it to anyone reading this to see the pictures and his
explanation of what's going on and how far we have to go.

That said and done. Tissue regeneration has a long way to go and the most
pressing problem right now is how do you give the organs their intricate
structure? How do you make a scaffold, or lay some kind of foundation for
everything to come together? That has to be one of the most fascinating
problems I have ever encountered.

I would give my arm to work on this. :)

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Mz
_Tissue regeneration has a long way to go and the most pressing problem right
now is how do you give the organs their intricate structure? How do you make a
scaffold, or lay some kind of foundation for everything to come together?_

The body already has that information. It's called DNA. I've had a hole in my
left lung close and decades-old scars itch like new scars and visibly shrink.
The body can regenerate itself if you clean it up adequately and give it
sufficient resources to rebuild (nutritionally).

Thank you for the video. It's highly relevant to my interests.

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todayiamme
I am not denying that it does. What I am trying to say is that when you are
trying to grow an entire organ for a person then how can you tell it where the
intricate structures should be? A heart has chambers, valves and a structure
that responds dynamically to pressure. How do you make that? From essentially
nothing.

An embryo does it, somehow, by magic that no one truly understands. That's a
puzzle we need to solve. I've spent some time reading about it, but I have no
clue whatsoever what lies beyond the surface.

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Mz
No, I understand what you are trying to say. But perhaps you don't understand
what I am trying to say. I am saying that I was diagnosed in 2001 with
"atypical cystic fibrosis" -- a degenerative "disease" where the typical
course is that infection eats away the lungs until they eventually drop below
some critical percentage (I think 50%) of normal functioning and the person
gets listed for transplant (if they are lucky/haven't engaged in behaviors
that disqualify them). I had a hole in my lung from repeated infections. This
is something conventional medicine claims does not heal. You just live with it
and watch the holes grow larger until they replace the organ. According to my
most recent x-rays and how I feel (because the damn thing was quite painful),
I no longer have a hole in my left lung. My fingernails are also much stronger
and prettier than they have ever been. Fingertip health is strongly influenced
by lung health and I always had extremely crappy fingernails. As I healed, my
fingernails improved -- a strong indicator that my lungs are healthier than
they have ever been in my life.

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todayiamme
Wow.

Have you kept track of environmental factors? Like your diet in that time
frame as well as the air quality etc.? It would be just awesome to compile
that and see the correlations with other people's datasets. Perhaps, that
might lead to better strategies with dealing with atypical cystic fibrosis
before we can actually find a way to replicate this 100% of time.

By the way, does the percentage of damage matter? How damaged were your lungs?
Clearly, there has to be a threshold beyond which healing is nigh impossible,
but has anyone ever tried to define it outside of ballparks?

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Mz
I didn't track things on paper in the way you suggest. I have tried to share
my best understanding of the process here: <http://healthgazelle.com/> I would
like to learn a programming language and write a game (simulation) to try to
more effectively teach the process to others.

Of course the amount of damage matters. My 23 year old son has the same
diagnosis I have but was never anywhere near as sick as I was. Where he is at
provides clues to what may be possible for me. I don't know anyone else who
was as sick as I was and came back the way I have, so I don't have answers to
some of your questions.

My lungs were not deemed to be very damaged. I don't have a percentage. I have
been working on this for more than 9 years, but I had to figure it out as I
went. Presumably, if I can find the right means to share the mental model, it
should take less time for others to heal. Of course, the best hope is to
prevent damage in the first place, as was done for my son. It takes a lot of
resources to come back, though far less than conventional medicine currently
puts into this population with a result of basically dying slower. I think it
is great that some folks get a second chance at life by getting new lungs. But
I think it is horrifying and immoral that improving lung transplants is a much
higher priority for the medical community than keeping these people well in
the first place and keeping the lungs they were born with healthy and
functional.

