Why Spinal Injuries (Even Minor Ones) Are Next To Impossible To Completely Fix.
In: Biology
Any central nervous system injury is very hard to recover from because neurons don’t get replaced for the most part and when connections are severed, it’s very hard to have some recovery. It can happen tho, some people depending on the injury can have a very good recovery.
Easily put, it’s like your spinal cord is a major series of highway between two cities : your brain and your body, and informations like body position, motricity and sucj are cars on the roads.. During an injury, imagine a bomb dropping from wherever the fuc it came from and exploding on one of the highway and completely blocking the road : The connection is severed, the information cannot pass between the two cities.
So you have two big problems :
1 -> The road is fucked. You need a new one. Theorically, it’s not that hard to rebuild.
2 -> The explosion provoked a massive fire (inflammation) that will spread everywhere on the remaining roads if not contained : That’s number 1 priority.
SO you have firemen (immune system) and their buddies police officers (glial cells, others cells in the brain than neurons, they are essential for maintaining a good neuronal environment) coming to the site of injury. The fireman try to put out the fire and the police officers completely block the road and tell every road maintenance guy to fuck off and to repair the road later.
But the situation is critical, and the fire is so big, that firemeen only have one option with the help of police officers, you need to condemn the road by building a massive sort of sarcophage around the highway that contains the fire. So that’s what they do, they clean up what they can clean up, build a sarcophage (glial scaring) and thus the fire do not spread but the road is completely condemned and cannot be repaired.
That’s essentially why spinal injuries suck. The road is never repaired in order to kill the fire in order to avoid spreading the injury. The road tho never gets repaired because the sarcophage cannot be dismantled.
That’s a necessary evil action of the body. And keep in mind that even though rebuilding a new road is possible, the road maintenance guys are not the brightest and could possibly rebuild something wrong instead of the original road, that’s also what your body tries to avoid by not repairing the injury.
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