Considering the fact that a female body can form a fully functioning body inside its womb in 9 months, shouldn’t it be much easier to, suppose, fix a leg injury? Why can it not do the same to repair itself?
In: Biology
It depends on the injury and the way of tissue regeneration. Let’s take the skin for example. A small cut can heal with no/minimal scar tissue because the epidermis(top layer) on both sides of the cut are close and can reconnect. Bigger defects can’t reproduce the same type of tissue and it is replaced with connective tissue(colagen fibers)and the result is a scar. The only structure that can heal with no scars/changes in form and function are bones.
The female body is designed to nurture and sustain a fetus through childbirth. There are hormones, muscles, ligaments, and other parts that work together toward this end.
The leg, however, is not designed to be broken by an outside force and repair itself. A displaced fracture, for example, cannot realign the broken ends to heal; without intervention, the displacement will remain, poorly healing the limb and likely causing disfigurement and loss of function.
Minor cuts and scrapes do heal themselves, generally with no intervention.
Healing and development are two very different processes. While you have instructions to make every single part of your body, actually using them outside the context to regenerate missing pieces isn’t straight forward.
I have a lot I could say to this end (I study biology and related science topics, woo!), but to keep this ELI5 and not super wordy, I could describe it (loosely) as the difference between assembling a car from an instruction manual and a set of brand new parts, and trying to partially disassemble and repair a car while it’s still driving down the road and you can’t stop. You often try for (or are only able to use) patches and ‘compensations’ for missing pieces rather than rebuilding something entirely to be factory-made quality.
There was basically the same question just a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ftua1b/eli5_why_do_some_injuries_last_forever/
Also a pregnancy (from a biological pov) is a fucking nightmare to the female body. It easily leads to lasting conditions and issues. Stretchmarks being one of the minor issues. But perineal tears are common during birth. Spontaneous rib fractures during the last trimester aren’t that rare. Diabetes, incontinence, thyroid issues, IBS a lot of other endocrine issues and more can develop during a pregnancy and persist afterwards.
Even with modern medicine, pregnancy takes a heavy toll on the human body and should not be underestimated.
Stem cells. Not a doctor or biologist but here’s my story. My newborn (less than a week old) managed to scratch his face pretty bad. A scratch like that on me would take 2 weeks to heal. His healed in an afternoon.
(For some injuries) Blood heals bc blood has nutrients. Some things don’t have much blood (like ankles, tendons, etc). So, those things take much more time to heal.
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