Dr Mercola of mercola.com had a good article on bones this month, particularly about people taking too much calcium. Nothing new if you’ve been reading this blog but it’s good that the news is getting closer to mainstream. You can find it through his search engine by putting in ‘Can calcium make bones weaker’.
Then Dr Brown’s newsletter talked about a study that proves 10 prunes a day builds bone. I believe this but I also think fresh fruit would do the job better. They didn’t test that because they were looking for a widely available substance and prunes, like bananas, are available pretty much everywhere.
I think that it would be difficult to eat 10 prunes a day for ever, even after you get over the initial diarrhea, and it would also be pretty costly.
The last piece of news is the most interesting. The army has developed a bone putty for soldiers with bad bone breaks. It surrounds the bone and serves as a matrix to hold it together while it is healing, then it dissolves and leaves the body. Sounds pretty amazing.
“The fracture putty will serve as a bioactive scaffold and will be able to substitute for the damaged bone,” said principal researcher Mauro Ferrari. “At the same time, the putty will facilitate the formation of natural bone and self-healing in the surrounding soft tissue through the attraction of the patient’s own stem cells. The putty will have the texture of modeling clay so that it can be molded in any shape in order to be used in many different surgical applications, including the reconnection of separated bones and the replacement of missing bones.”
This material could have the patient up and around in as little as a week, according to the researchers.
The funny part is that they say if it does work out as planned they will eventually use it on civilians who have been in car accidents, etc. It doesn’t cross any of their minds that it would be great for older women with hip fractures. We are obviously totally out of their frame of reference. But the reason why hip fractures for women are so detrimental is that they take so long to heal and cause complete immobility. It’s usually the lying around that kills womem, not the actual fracture.
I read it on a Cnet news article but I won’t link to it because the links never last long. Google bone putty and you’ll find it. It certainly is amazing what they are doing with medical research that doesn’t involve drugs. When soldiers are the target the research is more likely to be around new techniques, equipment and supplies because the government isn’t interested in putting its soldiers on a myriad of drugs.
I read a very interesting letter from Micheal More today where he said that General Motors invented ‘planned obsolescence’. They decided to build cars that would fall apart in two years so you would have to buy another one. He makes the case that this was flagrant disregard of the well-being of their customers and was the beginning of their downfall.
I’m hoping that the opposite tack of BigPharma – to put all Americans on drugs forever that don’t heal us but just mask the symptoms so we will keep buying – will be their downfall. We aren’t stupid, after all, and our natural trust in the medical system has been eroded. The ones who trusted doctors implicitly, no matter what, are dying off now and the young ones are too smart to go there.
Take care,
Pam