I know that the exception is those big, main vessels when doing open heart surgery or something like that, but I’m just talking in general smaller vessels.
Like in the nose for example. Too many nosebleeds? Cauterize the vessel! If I understand correctly, after cauterization, blood can no longer flow through that vessel, so it must somehow find another way. But each vessel should exist for a reason. How does cauterizing one have no side effect?
Maybe you chase nosebleeds and cauterize a vessel each year for 50 years. Is there an upper limit to how many blood vessels can be cauterized in a region?
In: Biology
Pretty much, but also the body grows new blood vessels in response to demand, at least smaller ones. If you take out some capillaries, new ones will form and hopefully they won’t have problems like the originals did. As far as a limit goes, you would probably conclude that cauterization wasn’t cutting it long before you spent half a century chasing your tail. Still realistically you’re cauterizing a tiny branch of a tiny vessel, and they can regenerate surprisingly quickly so there should be no limit in that respect. Scar tissue and other issues might emerge, but really who knows, since no one has ever gone through 50 years of failed cauterization procedures.
I think a lot of people think about the circulatory system like a racetrack with one possible circuit around the body. But it’s much more accurate to think about it like a highway system that connects to local roads. So what happens when you exit the highway and find out that the road you need is closed? You just take a different road and bypass the closed section. Then you can take a different exit onto the next highway that you need
Yup. Evolution is great at creating “cheap redundancy,” which means your body makes a backup of anything it can unless there’s a downside to doing so.
Making a second heart or a second brain is too expensive. But making tons of blood vessels is really easy. Everything else is somewhere in-between. We have two eyes, two hands, to nostrils, extra teeth, extra toes, extra fingers.
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