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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I’m on the cell biology side and not the material sciences/bioengineering side so. With this I am hypothesizing/extrapolating somewhat. But:
While the body does have some pretty good healing properties, it’s frequently not true regeneration. Actual regeneration is not present in a lot of cell types. Your body can heal and replace some cells with ease, especially when those cells are *designed* to be replicable, such as outer layers of your skin and the lining of your gut. Other cell types, don’t recover so well. Healing is more about patching and covering wounds up to keep you alive and as healthy as it can manage, maybe with something completely different than what used to be there before (like scar tissue).
Legitimately, the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is actually very inaccurate in a lot of biology–your body accumulates damage over time, that does not heal to its previous state, and aging is potentially owed to some of this accumulated damage just due to living. And, some cells do not tolerate damage well. Nerve cells are delicate, frequently very long lived, and don’t really have much of a good replacement system when they’re lost. In some organs, damage can be made up for by other cells taking the jobs of the cells that were lost. Maybe, at some % lost total capacity, but that’s rarely something you notice unless it gets bad. Basically post-development is usually the best any particular part of your body will be, as the process that generated them is the most whole and complete way of getting everything in the right place and made of the right stuff. Everything after that is patching it together as best you can, for the many parts you aren’t equipped to replace outright.
Joints, suck. Patchwork healing can screw them up, little deviations or imperfections can cause huge problems, and there’s no way to just start over from scratch. We do have advanced materials, but making sure that agrees well with the body is a huge challenge, especially if they could be recognized as foreign and get patched over as a potential hazard, fought by the body they are inside of, or wear down in a way the body isn’t prepared to deal with for its natural what-should-be-there-instead. Or it just, doesn’t go together well.
And if there’s nerve damage and the like, there’s not an existing technology to really replace that yet, even if you restore the joint well.
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