Why can’t all injuries heal conpletely?
I hear all the time about athletes who do something wrong at the gym and could never work out again. Why doesn’t their body heal like normal?
In: Biology
it’s bcoz some tissues like nerves and cartilage don’t heal as easily as others, repeated injuries or severe damage can lead to permanent issues which is why some athletes struggle to fully recover
The body heals everything quickly and in the most efficient way possible, as best as it can, and It wants to reduce pain and energy consumption doing so.
For example if we don’t use cast for broken bones, in most cases they will heal in a haphazard way, fixing the issue, but creating a long term problem for the body.
some tissues of the body don’t have blood flowing to them! so they can only absorb nutrients passively. this can make things like hip and shoulder joints heal very slowly or never heal if the damage was bad enough
To add to what others have mentioned, sometimes broken bones do not heal perfectly. I got in a motorcycle accident in my early 20’s and broke my arm super close the shoulder socket; unfortunately it did not align perfectly as the bones were healing and now I don’t have full range of motion in that arm.
In my case it doesn’t really impact my day-to-day life in a substantial way, but if it were an athlete who did any sort of throwing in their sport, it could be a career ending issue.
Consider a rope that runs through a pulley to hold something up, and one day it starts to fray slightly.
You can quickly wrap the rope with tape, but that’s only going to prevent more fraying in the future. You can go in and sew every frayed piece back into place, but the extra material from the thread means it doesn’t go through the pulley quite as smoothly. You can even, in an especially bad situation, replace the rope entirely, at which point it will function almost as good as new, although it might take some work to get used to.
This is the average injury.
In some cases, though, you start out with a shockingly high quality rope. Because of a manufacturing quirk, it turns out it was just better made than any other rope you can find, and as a result there’s no way to replace it exactly. You can still make everything function with the slightly worse replacement, but it won’t work *quite* as well.
This is an athlete’s injury.
One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that healing is done at the cellular level. Cells aren’t very smart and the body can only coordinate them so well. For example, when a bone breaks, the way it heals is that specialized cells will dissolve the bone and reform the bone back from at the site of the break. If the bone is properly set and kept from moving too much, that is good enough. But if untreated and misaligned, the cells will just keep rebuilding the bone from the two broken ends without any knowledge that the bone is misaligned.
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