I would think the body would heal when it gets warm or medical technology is advanced enough to allow some healing.
In: Biology
Depends on how bad the damage is. If parts of the body are actually *dead*, they are not coming back to life. Death is permanent. In fact they will begin to rot and release that rotten material into the rest of your body causing all sorts of health problems as it moves through your body.
The best course of action is to chop off the dead material and throw it away so that can’t happen. It sucks, but that’s how it is.
When things freeze at the temperatures you see on Everest (not cryogenic cold) it creates jagged ice crystals that rupture cell walls. That’s why a frozen cut of meat leaks juices out when you defrost it. The same thing happens to severely frostbitten limbs.
You can’t heal what’s dead. If frostbite is severe enough it will kill the affected area. If you don’t amputate it will rot on the body and you’ll end up with a deadly infection from the toxins. This is known as gangrene
Pop an apple in the freezer and the defrost a day later. The cells are ruptured and broken, that’s as dead as it gets. That’s what they are amputating.
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I’m pretty sure it’s because ice crystallizes and shreds cells. So like none of them can replicate to replace the damaged ones
When cells of the body are frozen, the crystaline structure tears up the cell walls and organelles. When it thaws out, it’s a wreck. Kind of like how you can thaw out frozen vegetables, but they’ll never be crispy again.
Frostbite means your tissue is freezing, and ice at a microscopic level in that sense is like a bunch of sharp points which can tear stuff up, on top of that it stops getting oxygen and now you have something that is attached to you that is literally dead, and once tissue dies there isn’t really a way to make it come back, so you’re only left with cutting it off and hoping nothing leeched into your circulatory system from the dead tissue
If they’re amputating, then that means the frostbite is severe. Mild frostbite cases (frostnip), sure, maybe you can heal through it, but sever frostbite, no, the tissue is dead, and you can’t heal what’s dead. In that case, if you didn’t amputate, you would also be at risk of dying yourself.
Frostbite is harmful because it entails body fluids (mostly blood and cell fluid) freezing, and ice has a few properties that make it very harmful when it forms inside the body.
First, water expands when it freezes. This alone can cause cell damage as cells expand and rupture their membranes. But this gets worse because another one of the body’s reactions to cold is narrowing blood vessels. Having expanding blood in a narrowing space means blood vessels will rupture and blood won’t get where it needs to go. If this goes on too long, blood flow to an area can stop entirely.
Second, ice is sharp. The ice crystals that form from frostbite are like tiny razors drifting through the body, tearing gashes in cell membranes and blood vessels.
These factors mean that many cells die from ice damage, and those that aren’t killed can, in turn, die from the reduced blood flow. And the dead cells are dead, they won’t be revived by rewarming, they’re just dead tissue that needs to be removed to prevent gangrene or sepsis.
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