Health News and Information

To get the body, which has had inflammation or disease or injury of any kind, back to anything approaching normal, there must be repair work done. This is as fundamental a process as is inflammation, and it occurs throughout the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

A tree can be badly injured and do marvelous repairs job to itself. I had a twenty-foot elm in my back yard. Boys sawed nearly three-quarters of the way through the trunk and the chances of the tree’s growing up to be a fine specimen looked slim indeed. But on the edges of the cut, the live layer of bark started to grow and fill in. Gradually this filling-in closed around the trunk so that the sap was nowhere cut off from its upward course. Now, not many years later, the tree is in fine shape. The only evidence is a ring – a sort of scar tissue – that looks like swollen bark and that goes three-quarters of the way around the trunk.

In the kingdom of man and beast, the lower in the animal scale, the more complete is the regeneration. We are told that if a lobster loses his claw he grows a new one. Man cannot reproduce even a lost little finger. Cut off a lowly earthworm’s head and he grows a new one. Only metaphorically can we do anything like that. Even in the human body this rule of the power of comeback of the lowly holds good. Our nerve cells are highly developed and specialized. Destroy one of them and it is gone forever and no other can take its place. Poliomyelitis destroys nerve cells in the spinal cord. That ends the activity of the muscle fibers which they controlled; hence the well-known paralysis. At the other extreme are our connective tissue cells. Their job is a simple one: just holding things together. They are usually rather small quiet things; not much to look at. But injure this tissue and the cells swell up and reach out towards one another like the line men of a football team bunching up to stop a line plunge.

Apparently the injured cells spill some substance which stimulates the remaining ones and a substance called collagen is formed. This is a Greek word meaning glue. In my youth I had access to a wood-working shop and I was told there that the broken rocker of a chair neatly fitted together and well glued would never break again at that spot. That indicates the value of collagen. To get enough of a good-quality collagen, one must have plenty of Vitamin C, which is found in fruit and vegetables. So always have your glass of orange juice for breakfast and a nice crisp salad for dinner.

Some substance from the injured tissues stimulates the cells to repair. Stimulation and irritation are the same except possibly for the question of degree and it is interesting that Dr. Alexis Carrel found that if an aseptic (that is, uninfected) wound was carefully cleaned of all blood clot and debris and completely protected from outside irritation, no healing would occur. I like the word heal meaning hale, healthy or sound, which is more personal than repair. Except when used figuratively, heal refers to living matter, while an old pair of shoes or anything inanimate may be repaired.

The ideal healing occurs in such wounds as a surgeon may make where the surfaces are brought together accurately and held there by stitches. We have a lovely phrase for what takes place then: healing by first intention. The connective tissue cells interlace and contract, forming scar tissue, and the smallest blood vessels bud out, increasing the blood supply. The wound may heal firmly in a few days, particularly in the face, where the blood supply is profuse. Because of all this extra blood supply, such wounds are red at first, but later the blood vessels close off with the resulting white scar with which you are all familiar. The skin cells slide over the edge of the wound, closing it off. No new hair or sweat glands appear here for they are complex tissues, high in the scale.

Not all wounds, of course, are simple cuts, allowing the surfaces to be brought together. Much tissue may be lost and no longer do we have first-intention healing. Such wounds are closed in by what we call “granulation tissue.” Great numbers of little loops of blood vessels grow out on the surface of the wound slowly forming scar tissue, which as it contracts has a tendency to shrink the wound. Infection in a wound increases the amount of granulation tissue, making the “proud” flesh with which many of you are familiar. This will resist the penetration of infection into the deeper tissue.   The skin slowly creeps in from the edges of the wound but the final result is likely to be an unyielding scar with thin, poorly nourished skin over it.

The state of the body also influences healing so that poorly nourished people, especially those not getting enough protein, do not heal well. One of the bad aspects of cortisone is that it interferes with healing as it does with inflammation. Repair and inflammation are closely related.

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GENERAL HEALTH

The worst consequence of marijuana use may be that it opens the door to harder drugs. Dr. Richard R. Clayton of the University of Kentucky in Lexington says flatly that marijuana “causes” heroin and cocaine use. He cites figures showing that the more marijuana a person smokes the more likely he or she is to use heroin or cocaine or both.

Dr. Denise Kandel of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan says that “cause” is too strong a word because only a small fraction of marijuana smokers go on to use other drugs. But, she points out, her 1971 and 1980 studies of 8,000 public high school students in New York State reveal that nearly all cocaine and heroin users start with marijuana.

In the late 1970s a survey of 17,000 high seniors by the National Institute Drug Abuse, found young people understand that regular use of any drug carries a high risk. But, in a curious way, they don’t feel at risk themselves. When they buy drugs on the street, they do not know the quality, cleanliness, dose, or the actual chemical they will be putting into their bodies.

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GENERAL HEALTH