Chapter 1949 【1949】Materials Science
Human bones are a part of a person, and bones are composed of bone tissue, and living bone cells are a part of bone tissue.
Regardless of the heavy tools that orthopedic surgeons hold in their hands, just like other surgeries, orthopedic surgeons hope to use the body's own cells to repair damaged parts in all the treatments that orthopedic surgeons do to patients. Only in this way is the most natural, longest lasting and least side effect.
According to this idea, the best bone to fill the gap should be autogenous bone. Autogenous bone is part of the patient's own healthy bone, or the bone material is extracted from a large bone, usually spongy bone.
Just thinking about the procedure of bone harvesting, the patient and his family members can feel the great pain that the patient has to endure. In the past, there was no breakthrough in materials science, and doctors and patients had no choice but to go this way. Therefore, autogenous bone is not the best way.
It is said that it is best to use the patient's own cells, what should I do if I don't use autologous bone. Don't get it wrong here. What the doctor hopes to use is the self-repair function of human cells, and there is no complete equality between whether to use autologous bone or not.
After continuous research and progress in materials science, scientists and medical scientists have discovered that they only need to find materials that can fuse with human cells for grafting, just like salt and water in the end. There is no need to take other tissues from the patient's body to fill in gap. This is the most cutting-edge field of contemporary medical research. When we go to various departments for medical treatment, we often hear the proper term from doctors called biocompatibility of materials.
In addition to biocompatibility, bones have the characteristics of bones, and orthopedic surgeons should consider other specialty factors when choosing their own specialty materials. For example, this material needs to act like human bones, be able to adapt to the mechanical conduction of the human body, and have certain mechanical properties. The material must have a microporous structure that allows human cells to drill in and grow. Preferably, it can be absorbed and digested by human tissue like absorbable sutures. In this case, the material needs to be absorbed at a rate similar to that of bone cells. Finally, just like plaster can allow doctors to shape, the human bone itself has a three-dimensional shape.
The above requirements once again show that medicine is a science that integrates the most cutting-edge technology of all sciences. Is there such a material? There are, but certainly not the best one. If it can be found, human beings have already cracked 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 a piece of the child's own healthy bone, unless it is absolutely necessary. However, this spinal surgery removes a whole piece of bone from the patient, unlike other bone defect surgeries where artificial bones can be used to fill in the missing parts. To put it simply, after removing the whole bone, there are too many bone gaps, and it is not suitable to fill them with artificial bones. 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 role of the autologous bone with the artificial bone to make up for the insufficient autologous bone within a certain period of time and waiting for the autologous bone to grow. The mixing ratio can be one to one.
Autologous bone does not cut other bones. Doctors can get local materials. For example, spinal surgery often uses decompressed bone to make mixed autogenous bone, and the broken rib is smashed into pieces for waste utilization.