For those of you who haven’t ever broken a bone, you’ll have no idea just how painful it is. Until you get that bone set every movement is an agony and ever jolt or jostle is a cruel and vicious torment. Once it is set, you don’t really notice it and things go more or less back to normal. The tricky thing then is the waiting. You’ve got to be ever so patient when it comes to your bones healing. If you rush the process and if your bone sets wrong, you could wind up with near permanent disfigurement or a weakened bone, neither of which are really desirable outcomes. Providing you’re patient and you take it relatively easy, you’ll be back in working order before too long.
Scientists at the universities of Edinburgh and Southampton have teamed up to try and shorten the healing times of bones. People who have suffered serious bone injuries or the elderly who heal much slower anyway will find the next piece of news very exciting!
By using a very light form of degradable plastic, they’ve created a framework on which new bone tissue can grow. It’s made in a honeycomb framework so that blood can grow through it and bone stem cells are very quick to attach to it. The plastic degrades after a set amount of time, leaving new bone in its place.
This method of repairing bones has been shown to work in lab conditions. The next step is to run human trials to make sure it’s entirely safe. Once this has been verified we could see treatments like this catch on all over the world. People simply don’t want to wait ages for their bones to heal and any way to speed up the process will be greeted with wide open arms.
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