The Silver Wand 175
We may only have scratched the surface of positive silver's medical
brilliance. Already it's an amazing tool. It stimulates bone-forming
cells, cures the most stubborn infections of all kinds of bacteria, and
stimulates healing in skin and other soft tissues. We don't know
whether the treatment can induce healing in other parts of the body, but
the possibility is there, and there may be other marvels latent in this
magic caduceus. Just before our research group was disbanded, we stud-
ied malignant fibrosarcoma cells (cancerous fibroblasts) and found that
electrically injected silver suspended their runaway mitosis. Most impor-
tant of all, the technique makes it possible to produce large numbers of
dedifferentiated cells, overcoming the main problem of mammalian re-
generation—the limited number of bone marrow cells that dedifferenti-
ate in response to electrical current alone. Whatever its precise mode of
action may be, the electrically generated silver ion can produce enough
cells for human blastemas; it has restored my belief that full regeneration
of limbs, and perhaps other body parts, can be accomplished in humans.
Many questions remain, however. We don't know how the changed
cells speed up healing or how the silver changes them. We don't know
how electrically produced silver ions differ from ordinary dissolved ions,
only that they do. They evoke widely different reactions from the fibro-
blasts, and the cells affected by dissolved ions close to the electrode are
prevented from dedifferentiating in response to the electrified silver.
Most important is a search for possible delayed side effects.
These questions urgently need research by some good electrochemists,
but the work isn't being done. We were probably lucky we hadn't found
this effect in our first round of lab tests on silver electrodes. The Food
and Drug Administration let us test the antibacterial technique on se-
lected patients because we found no toxicity and because a few hours a
day was enough. To say that the same electrodes run for a longer time
could stimulate healing was such a bold claim that permission probably
would have been denied. At this point, however, we sorely need enough
imagination on the part of research sponsors to follow up these leads in
the laboratories, while making the treatment available now to the des-
perate few who have no other hope.
The Fracture Market
Where does all this leave us in our understanding of electrically trig-
gered bone healing? I'm afraid we're not too much better off than the
nineteenth-century doctors who lost this effective treatment because no
one understood it well enough to defend it from electrotherapy's oppo-