[HN Gopher] First Transient Electronic Bandage Speeds Healing by...
___________________________________________________________________
First Transient Electronic Bandage Speeds Healing by 30 Percent
Author : lxm
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-03-13 00:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mccormick.northwestern.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mccormick.northwestern.edu)
| bilekas wrote:
| > When the wound is healed, the flower-shaped electrode simply
| dissolves into the body, bypassing the need to retrieve it.
|
| This is probably the most incredible tech discovery of all this
| to me. Insane how it can just be absorbed by the body with no
| side-effects.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| > with no side-effects
|
| Citation and years needed...
| knodi123 wrote:
| I had a steel splinter in my thumb once. It turned gray, and
| then just faded, over a span of 6 months or so. I was
| disappointed, because I could use it to feel magnetic fields,
| which was really neat.
| bioemerl wrote:
| > The team made the electrodes from a metal called molybdenum,
| which is widely used in electronic and semiconductor
| applications. They discovered that when molybdenum is thin
| enough, it can biodegrade. Furthermore, it does not interfere
| with the healing process.
|
| Fda limits the metal to 2 mg a day.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Most likely, it's not an issue:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916
|
| I mean unless they stick a _bunch_ of these mini electrodes
| all over you.
| tomxor wrote:
| I cant help but think when reading another paper with a "think of
| the diabetic masses" spin on it, how much pain an suffering could
| be avoided if as much focus was put on improving peoples
| nutrition at market scales.
|
| We know now that highly refined carb and sugar based food that
| makes up 95% of what is sold in the west is pretty much
| singularly responsible for diabetes, and the more we learn about
| the effects of the clever substitutes we come up with like
| sweeteners the more we realise that these are as bad if not worse
| at increasing insulin resistance. We've created our own diabetes
| epidemic through technology, using the cost function of yield and
| profit for food processing, and it feels like we are reaching for
| technology to also treat the myriad symptoms instead of challenge
| that cost function to include human health.
|
| I'm sure this technology has broad utility beyond diabetes, but
| people keep including it in every medical paper, maybe it's not
| really the authors focus.
|
| [edit]
|
| Judging by votes I seem to have offended people, to be clear I
| don't blame people for poor diets, and I don't blame diabetics
| for becoming diabetic, I blame industry. Of course if it's food
| industry people that I've offended then fuck you :) if other
| reasons, do explain.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes
|
| 1. You should say Type 2 Diabetes when you're talking about it.
| Type 1 and Type 2 are vastly different things. Diet and
| exercise help with making Type 1 easier to manage, but they
| don't "fix" it in any way.
|
| 2. There exist people for whom reducing the effects of Type 2
| diabetes is harder than just a simple diet change. Things to
| help Type 2 can help these people make their lives better.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I agree with the thrust of your point and said something
| similar in the previous discussion.
|
| But there's a lot we don't understand about diabetes. It's more
| complicated than just sugar and there's a lot of room to
| improve our understanding.
| devmor wrote:
| If you look at the food production industry as a whole in the
| US, the picture of why funding and effort is not put into
| fixing nutrition becomes very clear.
|
| It's extremely profitable AND nearly risk-proof to run monocrop
| farms to produce varieties of corn, which can be grown as
| necessary to sell based on what has higher demand in the
| current season: sweetener, meal, whole ears, biofuel, cattle
| feed, etc. It's much less profitable to run a farm full of
| different types of crops that must be grown, harvested, watered
| and cared for in different ways - and have 1 or 2 markets at
| most.
|
| If you were to create a venn diagram of the share holding firms
| in major farming operations compared to the shareholders in
| major food production companies, it would be very close to a
| circle. Thus, it's in the best interest (as far as turning
| short-term profits) of those shareholders to ensure high corn
| production and high corn use, filling our shelves with high-
| calorie, low-nutrition products.
|
| There are many more tangents to go on that end in a similar
| "hooray, short-term profits" conclusion. To name a few:
|
| Heavily-preserved food that can stay on shelves longer, and
| thus contains too much sodium.
|
| Long commutes and work hours that benefit corporations,
| resulting in high demand for pre-packaged food that has lost
| many essential nutrients in its preparation method.
|
| High rents and housing costs from real estate speculation
| leading to people having small, inadequate kitchens and
| ordering food more.
| devbent wrote:
| Corn syrup has rapidly been vanishing from foods based on
| consumer demand. A decade ago buying bread without corn syrup
| in it was a challenge, now days all but the cheapest bread in
| stores proudly had "no corn syrup!" printed on the label.
|
| > leading to people having small, inadequate kitchens and
| ordering food more.
|
| Friend of mine has been undergoing a kitchen remodel and
| cooking for a family of 4 using a plug in induction burner
| for the last 5 or 6 months. Historically kitchens were small
| and families were big. Outside of kitchens that only have a
| microwave, even a small 2 burner range will suffice, although
| it will strongly limit what dishes can be prepared in
| reasonable time.
|
| > thus contains too much sodium
|
| Sodium is an often blamed boogie man, but undeservedly so.
| Outside of people with chronic health conditions, it is
| _really_ hard to intake so much sodium such that it has a
| negative impact on health.
|
| The problems in the US food supply are likely a lot more
| subtle and nuanced than too much fat or salt. People have
| been eating salted fatty cuts of meat for thousands of years
| w/o the health problems we see now days.
| tomxor wrote:
| Yes, these are all fair points, in a nut shell you could
| blame market forces and say industry behaviour is inevitable,
| which is what I was alluding to as the cost function.
|
| In other areas where this becomes a problem government
| intervene to change intensives, e.g the total cost of
| continuous alcohol consumption is not included in the sticker
| price, so some governments add a tax, same with tobacco...
| ideally such taxes would be directed to public spending on
| the medical costs, but that depends on the country.
|
| The same could be done far more broadly with food, not just a
| mere sugar tax, but taxing foods that are known to be product
| placements as poor substitutes for a full meal, that are too
| nutritionally devoid and contain too many substitutes. Just
| like alcohol, an occasional ready meal or highly refined cake
| isn't going to kill you or give you chronic disease, in which
| case it can be expensive to dissuade you from making it a
| regular thing and disincentivise industry from focusing on
| producing that type of food..
| devbent wrote:
| > Just like alcohol,
|
| Alcohol fucks with DNA. It is neurotoxic.
|
| Let's not lie to ourselves, the safe amount of booze is 0
| booze.
|
| I'm not saying don't drink, just that we should be 100%
| honest with ourselves.
| tomxor wrote:
| Yes, however it's the consistent consumption of high
| quantities of alcohol that cause chronic illness, and
| it's the same behaviour that is problematic in food, this
| is what diabetes is, sugar ends up being toxic
| (glucotoxicity). Even short term high sugar intake causes
| cell stress, it's not as toxic as alcohol, but long term
| consumption of either is problematic.
| devbent wrote:
| You should clarify, refined sugars.
|
| There is also the ongoing debate of why the hell
| consuming white rice, which is instantly broken down into
| large amounts of glucose, doesn't have the same negative
| health impact. Lots of investigations around fructose vs
| glucose and biological pathways of how straight fructose
| is processed and so on and so forth, but feel free to
| visit any SE Asian country where rice is well over 50% of
| meals by volume and obesity levels are low.
|
| I read a good series of investigative articles that
| posited it is contamination of our food supply from one
| or more unknown sources that explains why a diet
| consisting of highly processed food causes more chronic
| health conditions than a diet consisting of fresh foods
| even if the macro nutrient content is the same. (Wish I
| had bookmarked it...)
| devbent wrote:
| > Judging by votes
|
| You are mostly off topic. :)
|
| Likely no one will disagree with you that the standard American
| diet is a ultra processed chemical trash heap, just, that is
| not related to super cool wound healing tech.
|
| Diabetes isn't the topic of the article, diabetic ulcers were
| used in the clinical trial, but otherwise the story is about
| using electricity to heal open wounds.
| tomxor wrote:
| The paper targets diabetic ulcers... it's literally a band
| aid on diabetes.
|
| This is the trend in medical papers currently, target
| diabetics, which there are so many of. It's really not much
| of a tangent.
| [deleted]
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| What you're referring to is a political and economic problem,
| not a medical or technical problem.
| tomxor wrote:
| This is true, but it is a problem enabled by technology at
| the industrial level. Science could at least help reframe
| what has come to be accepted as "food".
| pengaru wrote:
| There's far more money to be made running dialysis centers in
| every strip mall than selling more carrots and broccoli.
|
| And don't you dare obstruct the fast path to dialysis because
| FREEDUM!!!
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| I'll be even more cynical and say that the "upper middle
| class on up" who's whims drive political policy actively DGAF
| because exercise and eating healthy are a lifestyle thing
| that separate them from the people below them.
| pengaru wrote:
| Except there are plenty "upper middle class on up" who
| don't take care of themselves either...
| xnx wrote:
| Widespread use of semaglutide might cure metabolic syndrome.
| tomxor wrote:
| Nutrition is not that simple, you cannot trick the body with
| a miracle cure chemical. If you cheat the body of nutrients
| there will be long term consequences.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Previous discussion based on an different article:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060657
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-14 23:02 UTC)