Chapter 1949： 【1949】Materials

Chapter 1949 [1949] Materials Science

Human bones are part of the human body, bones are composed of bone tissue, and living bone cells are part of bone tissue.

Don’t look at the heavy tools that orthopaedic surgeons hold in their hands. Like other surgeries, all treatments that orthopaedic surgeons help patients do also hope to use the body’s own cells to repair broken parts. This is the most natural, longest-lasting and lowest side effects.

According to this idea, the bone block to fill the gap should preferably be autologous bone. Autologous bone is a part of the patient's own healthy bone taken out of the bone or bone material extracted from a large bone, usually cancellous bone.

Just thinking of this surgical procedure for bone removal, patients and their families can feel the great pain that patients need to bear on their own. In the past, there was no breakthrough in materials science, and doctors and patients had no choice but to take this path. Therefore, autologous bone is not the best way.

It is said that it is best to use the patient's own cells, so what should we do without autologous bone. Make no mistake here. What doctors hope to use is the self-repairing effect of human cells, and whether or not to use autologous bone is not exactly the same sign.

After continuous research and progress in materials science, scientists and medical scientists have found that they only need to find materials that can be fused with human cells for grafting. For example, in the end, salt and water are integrated into one body, and there is no need to take other tissues of the patient's body to fill gap. This is the forefront of contemporary medical research. When we go to various departments for medical treatment, we often hear doctors say that the proper term is called biocompatibility of materials.

In addition to biocompatibility, bones have the characteristics of bones, and orthopaedic surgeons should consider other specialty factors when choosing their own specialty materials. For example, this material needs to act like human bone, can meet the mechanical conduction of the human body, and has certain mechanical properties. The material must have a microporous structure that allows human cells to burrow in and grow. It is best to be absorbed and digested by human tissue like absorbable sutures, so the material needs to be absorbed at about the same rate as the growth of bone cells. Finally, like a plaster, the doctor can shape it, and the human bone itself is a three-dimensional shape.

The above requirements once again reflect that medicine is a science that integrates the most advanced technologies of all sciences. Is there such a material? There are, but the best ones are definitely not found. If it can be found, human beings have already solved the life science and can replace God to create man. Therefore, the application of human bone cannot completely replace all the application scenarios of autologous bone.

Back to the current surgical patient. The patient is a teenager, and the doctor will definitely not cut the child's own healthy bones, unless there is no other choice. However, this spinal surgery removes a whole piece of bone from the patient, unlike other bone defect surgeries where artificial bone can be used to fill the missing part. To put it simply, after removing the whole piece of bone, too much bone is missing, and it is not suitable to use artificial bone to fill it. If you want to reuse human cells, seeds cannot be sprinkled in without soil.

For this reason, the doctor adds artificial bone to the patient's autologous bone for mixed filling, which is equivalent to replacing part of the autologous bone with the artificial bone to make up for the insufficient amount of the autologous bone within a certain period of time to wait for the autologous bone to grow. The mixing ratio can be one to one.

The autologous bone does not cut other bones. Doctors can draw materials on the spot. For example, spine surgery often uses decompressed bone to make mixed autologous bone, and the broken rib is pounded into broken bones for waste utilization.

(end of this chapter)