When someone experiences a vertebral rupture due to an accident, they often lose general movement in specific parts of their body. However, I’ve always wondered why, given the advancements in technology, it remains challenging to rebuild the vertebrae and allow the body to heal itself, given the body even has the ability to do it.
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Repairing bones is fairly easy. It’s done all the time, abd bones are happy to regrow.
But we’re not made out of one solid bone, we also have joints, and those joints, including the disks between vertebrae, are difficult to repair because the soft tissues that make them up do not regrow as easily as bones themselves. That’s why stuff like a torn ACL, achilles tendon or carpal tunnel basically are life-long issues.
Of course, that ignores the fact that the spine has the spinal cord. And that isn’t difficult to repair. It just isn’t possible. We can’t repair nerves. There’s ways to somewhat encourage a degree of natural recovery where possible (like if the spine wasn’t totally severed, just mostly), but it’s always a minor improvement. Maybe return some feeling in a paralysed limb, but not movement.
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