From a cosmetic point of view, almost everybody exclusively focuses on the skin to counter aging, when they should be at least as concerned with bone density.
Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.
For anyone else wondering: your body is continually pulling calcium from your bones for metabolic processes. Usually it gets replaced when you consume something with calcium in it.
It makes sense to have somewhere to store extra nutrients so you can keep functioning for a long time between taking in those specific nutrients again.
Your body does this with a lot of your organs. Fat is obviously calorie storage, but muscles can also be resorbed for energy under starvation conditions (or just when they're under used). Your kidneys can resorb water from stored urine, and your intestines pull most water out of what you consume. Most neurotransmitters and hormones get recycled at various rates and turned into new molecules.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all I know of offhand.
> Animal and human studies suggest that high-frequency, low-magnitude vibration therapy improves bone strength by increasing bone formation and decreasing bone resorption.
So you could apply vibration to the head bones. Not sure about any side effects.
Indeed. Wasn't there an article just a few days ago about Navy Seals (?) suffering brain injury from being too close to artillery being fired or some such? The vibrations in the skull were thought to be the culprit.
I have been getting ads lately for an aerobic step with a vibrating motor built into it, for this very purpose. It might have been on Peacock, and if so it was during Tour de France footage.
It’s a small effect but real, and it’s passive from the patient’s standpoint and we always seem to find that to be a selling point. This research was, if I recall, originally done for NASA and studied sheep. Shake a Sheep for Science!
Bone density is definitely an adaption from resistance exercise.
I don't know any specific studies, but I would expect that the bone density improvements are in some sense systemic in that the metabolic changes that increase bone density will have spillover effects to bones not directly involved in some given movement.
I suspected this page was written in MS FrontPage, and a quick peek at the source code seems to confirm it!
I love to see old pages still online. Netscape Composer got me through the 90s/00s
I lost a tooth after the pandemic. To seat an implant they pack the void with one of several things, including sterilized cadaver bone, then wait for the oocytes to colonize and make new bone.
I got a synthetic bone sand. Little bits of it migrated like glass slivers would but otherwise it wasn’t bad and at least I didn’t have dead people in my mouth.
Obviously this is a bit of a different scenario given the fairly substantial differences in the shape of the wound, but I wonder how much longer we will need to use naturally occurring materials versus synthesized ones, made in a sterile environment.
I highly doubt software that doctors use for patient notes and prescriptions would even have the option to enable autocorrect. If it does, that’s a giant oversight on the devs’ part.
We should also defenestrate whoever corrects the previous word or phrase based on what you just typed in iOS. The amount of times I've meant something very technical or specific to a field that a programmer in silicon valley has never heard of and then had that corrected to something else totally meaningless by the second or third word is an infuriating waste of time.
That behavior is so infuriating! Especially since I frequently fail to notice it because I am focused on the current word, not the one I had already confirmed as correct.
Oh how about autocorrect just having less words than a decent dictionary. Today autocorrect tried to convince me reciprocal wasn’t a word and that I wanted reciprocate. When and why did autocorrect / auto suggest / grammar all get conflated, especially outside of phones? When did merely uncommon usage become incorrect? It’s a small but rather constant annoyance and it really is Orwellian
My left thumb was reconstructed with coral fragments about 27 years ago. The bone exploded due to the growth of a benign cyst. 6 weeks in a cast to stabilize, then surgery to scoop out the cyst and replace the material. Then 6 more weeks in a cast.
When discussing replacement materials, my doctor offered cadaver graft or self transplant (surgically removing bone from my wrist or hip to build a graft). I was deep into Steve Haworth at the time, who was experimenting with implant materials including coral, so I asked about coral.
Without missing a beat, the doctor said they could definitely do that.
I asked if it was expensive, and he said no. I asked if it had a high rate of rejection, and he said it was comparable to self transplant.
Why was it not the first suggestion? Why did he not even mention it in the first place? Sadly, I forgot to ask these questions.
Haha, no, the porous coral was quickly infiltrated and deposited with actual bone. It still gives me trouble now and again (that bone has a goofy bend in it and is weaker than before), but is mostly indistinguishable from some other bone breaks I have had.
It's a shame Nature seems to keep these articles locked up forever. I found the first reference, which is a study from 2000, which is still paywalled and I can't read it. I'd be curious to know how state of the art has changed since this. I had a two level lumbar interbody fusion seven years ago, the procedure in which discs are removed and replaced by metal spacers that get seeded with a bone graft. Within about 18 months, you've got one solid bone. They seeded it with my own bone, sawed off of my pelvis, plus some kind of growth-stimulating protein. Beats me whether that was coral-derived or synthetic or what. I didn't think to ask. In any case, it certainly worked. It takes a while, but x-rays today look ridiculous. The bone is enormous, effectively growing around the original screws and rods that held everything in place while the bone was growing.
I guess the scaffold matrix in me must have been of the coating variety. As far as I was told, the spacers were just the same titanium alloy as the screws and rods, which for some reason don't set off metal detectors, which makes me wonder why nobody makes knives and guns out of the same material.
It'd be nice if they put a date on this page. The other references I could find were from 2011 and 1987.
These kinds of ideas to use stem-cells with foreign materials seemed in vogue back then, no idea how feasible they are in reality but an improvised similar technique for tracheae was how Paolo Macchiarini first got hyped and then convicted (He went on to try it on humans despite skipping animal trials of the technique).
> Macchiarini was convicted of unethically performing experimental surgeries, even on relatively healthy patients, resulting in fatalities for seven of the eight patients who received one of his synthetic trachea transplants.
Fuuuuck. I think I heard about this guy before he went mad scientist, but not after.
Yeah, the early hopeful news spread widely but the scandal and fallout certainly kept things in the news over here for a long time.
There's a Netflix pop-documentary called "Bad Surgeon" with a that does cover the viewpoint of the colleagues that turned whistleblowers (and the persecution they endured before media and prosecutors started looking into it) even if much of the focus is on his many concurrent women (the main one believing she's going to be wed by the pope).
It's not a major error -- the words are etymological siblings and it's clear what was meant. Repair translates to something resembling "reparation" in most romance languages so it's an easy translation mistake to make.
I worked recently with a guy who learned all of his big words from books. Very, very old books.
It was exhausting. And English is my first language. I felt sorry for my Indian coworkers. Jesus man, stop trying to look smart and just talk like a normal person. The intelligence is in the ideas not the words used to convey them.
I remember scott adams (in his heyday) saying this (use of dense or superliterary words that require extra processing) often happens when you don't have an argument and you want to divert attention from the argument to the words themselves.
Often, if you substitute the haughty words for more speedily parseable ones, you realise the argument falls apart, if there was one at all.
It might be simpler than that. Let me remind you all of how erudite I am. I am very smart, I had this idea, and I would like to share it with you, because smart people have smart ideas. Remember, I am very smart. Here’s my idea.
Some of the dumbest, or rather the most dangerous, ideas I’ve heard came from smart people. Lots of dumb ideas come from someone who isn’t in danger of bringing them to fruition. The Smart Guy is imminently in danger of doing so. Or I suppose rather that we are in imminent danger of him doing so.
Lots of people have perfect skin, but they still look old. Why? Bone morphology. The zygomatic bone erodes, and the orbital gaps widen. The mandible degrades and pivots down and backwards (jaw rotation). Issues like resorption are currently very challenging. Skin is comparatively much easier. Also (and besides well-known interventions like collagen, retinoids, HA, and dermarolling), Epidermal and Keratinocyte Growth Factors are already very cheap, and showing much promise.
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