Does a human just have so many blood vessels that cauterizing a few doesn’t matter?

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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

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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