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The Body Electric
With orthopedic resident surgeon Bruce Baker of the Upstate Medical
Center, we removed the cartilage layer from one side of the femur at the
knee in a series of white rabbits. The operation left a circular hole of
bare bone about 4 millimeters across. In the experimental animals we
implanted silver-platinum couplings like those used on the rats, drilling
the platinum end into the defect and tucking the rest along the bone.
Most of the control animals filled in the defect with scar tissue along
with some inferior fibrous cartilage. About a tenth of them grew a milli-
meter or two of good hyaline cartilage at the edge of the hole. But sure
enough, the rabbits with the implants showed greatly enhanced repair.
When we used an improved battery implant with silver wires at each
end, we got even better results. Two of the rabbits healed the damage
completely with beautiful hyaline cartilage just like the original mate-
rial.
A few years later, when we were testing various electrode metals, we
tried a different approach specifically for rheumatoid arthritis, in which
runaway inflammation causes phagocytes to attack healthy cartilage
cells. Gold salts taken orally sometimes control this disease but often
produce toxic side effects. We figured electrical injection of pure gold
directly into the joint with no other ions might work better. To find
out, Joe Spadaro and I produced rheumatoid arthritis in the knees of
both hind legs in forty rabbits, using a standard experimental procedure.
Then we treated one knee in each animal with a positive gold electrode
stuck right into the space between the two bones for two hours. Joe did
the actual treatments. Then we sacrificed the animals gradually over a
period of two months, and I examined both arthritic knees, not knowing
until later which had been given gold. During the first two weeks about
70 percent of the treated knees were markedly better than the untreated
ones. The improvement fell off to about 40 percent thereafter, suggest-
ing that the treatment must be repeated for continued results.
Obviously, these were only preliminary experiments. However, since
an estimated 31 million Americans suffer from arthritis, for which there
is no cure yet, I think both avenues should be thoroughly explored as
soon as possible.
Skull Bones
Lev Polezhaev has spent his career investigating what might be called
the
Polezhaev
principle - the greater the damage, the
better
the
re-
growth. He has found he can often enhance repair by adding homoge-