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
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.
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