Science Ain't So Bad

BACK ZAP

REJUVINATE YOUR BACK

Brian Saunders and Tony Freemont (University of Manchester) would inject a new kind of substance into aging spines to restore them to almost their “original” condition. Which we will discuss shortly. But first..

BACKS (According to MISTERScienceAintSoBad)

Your spine’s an upright column of bones (vertebrae) and disks. The disks are there to make things flexible and to absorb the shock from impact. The outer shell of the disk is fibrous. The inside’s pulpy.

It’s not a specially good design as it rarely outlasts the nose.

Long before your first midlife crisis, the disks are already drying up and cracking. Under considerable pressure, the pulp can squeeze out of the disks. Also, the disks, themselves, can become distorted or can start to fall apart (herniate). This can cause pressure against a nerve “root” where the nerve enters/leaves the spinal column.

That’s when you find yerself reading your emails on your side in bed.

If you lay around long enough and take anti-inflammatories, good chance you’ll be back to not getting enough exercise soon. Worst case, you’ll cycle through MRI’s, pills, injections, physical therapy, surgery, and prayer. Not necessarily that order.

A few months, and you get to repeat everything. This time, as an expert on the subject of back pain.

The crappy “intervertebral disk” is a constant annoyance to those who would argue that we got here from “Intelligent Design”. If this is intelligent design, what’s Dopey Design?

AN ASIDE

Kinda obvious that pressure against a nerve would cause pain.

Except for one thing.

Nerves CONDUCT sensations around the body. They don’t have pain sensors of their own. So why pain from pressure on a nerve?

Hey. Maybe it’s not really there! HUGE MISTERScienceAintSoBad breakthrough in orthopedics!! My first Nobel.

Back me out of the textbooks please. What’s going on: If you put constant pressure on a nerve, its blood supply (microvasculature) may get pinched, its outer cover (myelin sheath) may get scarred, causing a short circuit, or the nerve fibers may get stretched (constricted). All this stuff makes the nerve kinda hinkey, causing it to send bogus signals when it shouldn’t. The pain you feel isn’t from the site of the pressure, itself. It’s from the areas that are served by the  malfunctioning nerve.

NASA Mission Control would call this a “bad sensor”. A patient would call this a “bad day”.

THE INJECTION

Now, back to the guys from the University of Manchester.

MISTERScienceAintSoBad isn’t going to beat up on them. Their claims are reasonable. They say that their research is unfinished and they aren’t talking about a miracle cure.

Fair enough.

They are currently refining a fluid that they hope can be injected into a bad intervertebral disk. After being injected, the fluid will transform itself into a suitable substitute for the dehydrated nuceleus poposa, giving the spine a whole new life contract. If it works.

OTHER INJECTIONS

Something along these lines was  tried a few years ago, using a natural product (an extract from the papaya fruit called Chymopapain),  but, luckily for fruit lovers, it was abandoned when it turned out to have unacceptable side effects;   Saunders/Freemont get to study what went wrong there.

EverVigilant9 writes: What’re you NUTS? I had a back injection three weeks ago. No bigee! My doc says she’s been doing this a long time! So where’s the cheese, Big Boy?

OK. Good catch, EverVigilant.

Wrong ball though.

You’re getting steroidal injections (image guided), an accepted treatment for acute back pain. MISTERScienceAintSoBad knows this from personal experience. The difference is that those injections are intended to ease the inflammation of irritated tissue. Not as ambitious as the project we’re describing here. On the other hand, it’s real and in the clinic now. The Saunders/Freeman stuff is still a work-in-progress.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 4. One of those exciting ideas that’re full of potential and full of pitfalls.

Credit for top image (sans syringe): http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-4011886723

WITHOUT HIS GLASSES

“BREATHERS”

Remember Hal Finkelstein?

The glasses? The awful red sneakers?

Remember how he breathed through his mouth all the time? The way his nostrils seemed welded together? “Ngh! Gimme BANNNK my BOOK!”

Hey Finkelstein. You still out there? Maybe you should pop by the dentist. I been readin’ about mouth breathers – a study in General Dentistry by Yosh Jefferson, DMD.

Not good.

The faces of “breathers” change. In a bad way.

They get longer and narrower (like you, Finkelstien, now that I think about it).  Their teeth get crooked, their gums go bad, and they’re at at risk for ADD, high blood pressure, heart problems, and lots of other stuff.

If Finkelstein’s any example, it doesn’t do much for yer personality neither.  (Sorry Fink.)

I wouldn’t be so mean if there wasn’t stuff a mouth breather can do. But there is. Dr. Jefferson, being a dentist, suggests that a good place to start would be a.. a dentist. (I’m in shock!). A GP could probably help too.

Could be tonsils, adenoids, allergies, narrow passages (that can be expanded). Other stuff.

I also wouldn’t be so mean if Finkelstien didn’t happen to be a figment of my overheated imagination.

But you can be sure I’ll be hearing from SOME Hal Finkelstien anyway. He’ll turn out to be a mouth breather. And he’s gonna read this and HATE MISTER ScienceAintSoBad.

And I’ll hate myself!

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 0 to myself and my cruel indifference to the Hal Finkelstein’s of the world.

But ScienceAintSoBadRating  = 8 for a useful study, bringing to light an unexpected and troubling condition which can be remedied if caught.

STELLATE CELL ACTIVATION (Hey! I needed a picture.)

Oncology: Pancreatic Cancer. Head/Neck Cancer

What’s your favorite cancer?

I bet it isn’t pancreatic cancer.

The request queue for cancer’s pretty short. But the least popular members of this rather unpopular group of diseases may be things like the oral cancers (head and neck), pancreatic, and lung cancer. Course I haven’t taken a survey, and I bet there’re plenty of others that aren’t big favorites either. But if you DO have the bad luck to have a tumor, you want it to be at an early stage and easy to get at.

The pancreas, when it goes bad, doesn’t send off early warnings and it isn’t easy to get at. Aesthetics aside, things would probably work out much better with the pancreas if it were located on your ear. Signs of disease would be easier to spot early and snipping off the bad thing would be an outpatient procedure.

CANCER BOMBLETS

Well Mark Howard (University of Kent, School of Bioscience) hasn’t figured out a way to rotate your pancreas to your ear but he seems to be onto something equally (some would say more) exciting than a pancreas hanging off of your right ear:  cancer bullets.

Dr. Howard’s “thing” is the shape of certain amino acids (peptides). He was able to figure out how to optimize their ability to lock onto (bind with) cancer cells. Hook the amino acids to the right drugs, and you have a delivery system,  a “cancer bullet”.

DOES IT WORK?

You WOULD ask!

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad’s beat is science and Mark Howard is, in every sense, a scientist. But this is early in the process. It’s a remarkable accomplishment and he gets himself a ScienceAintSoBadRating of 10 which, while not a Nobel Prize, isn’t pigeon crap, either.  But that doesn’t mean this’ll permanently eradicate cancers. And, if it does, it remains to be seen if it will work for everyone. Those studies haven’t been done yet.

ScienceAintSoBadFingers are crossed.

REFRESHED

CANONIZING AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM

Several cities are toying with changing their names to Google to see if that’ll land ‘em ultrafast Internet.

Bejing, the Capital of China isn’t one of them.

But its good name IS being sullied by big piles of smelly garbage. Bejingers toss  out roughly 18,000 tons of garbage each day.

It’s out of space for garbage.

The 17 million neo-capitalists there are putting out 7,000 tons a day more than the dumps.. uh, ‘scuse moi!, .. the landfills can accommodate. It will be about 30,000 years before their garabage covers the whole land area of the earth, so we’re most worried about those of you who live nearby. Specially if you breathe.

One of the dump.. uh.. landfills is so bad that the social minded people of that area have, supposedly, taken to walking around holding each OTHERS noses.

Anyway, the government’s gonna do something about it.

CANNONS

According to Discover, they’re deploying a hundred specialized cannons to the site and the specialized cannons will be shooting out specialized deodorant which will, according to theory, mask, disguise, confound, and hide the odors from the landfill.

MISTER ScienceAin’tSoBad believes that this is science at its best. Creative, bold, AND public spirited. Sadly, the experts, say the leaders are a bunch of schmucks and that this little trick won’t work.

Oh well..

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 1

No More Colorblind Monkeys

Ophthalmology: Colorblindness

MONOCHROME WORLD

You always wondered, didn’t you? What’s it like to be colorblind? That word – blind. Very dark and murky. But, if you’re colorblind, it’s colors you can’t see. It’s not like yer gonna wump into a wall or anything.

So is it such a bad thing?

The answer’s kinda yes and kinda no.

Some people are only a LITTLE color blind. They see a lot of colors. But not all of them. And some people (with monochromasy) are flat out colorless – like a “black and white” movie. Just black, white, and a bunch of grays.

Minochromasy isn’t common. But if you’ve got it, I wouldn’t plan a career around painting or photography or even police work (“Watch  for a guy wearing a blue cardigan”). And try not to take stuff like “Those SOCKS! What’re you, colorblind?” to heart.

Whether it’s a disability or just a disadvantage, it is one a those imperfections that makes life richer (one might even say, more colorful) if, sometimes, a little tougher.

A CURE

So. Guess what Jay Neitz (University of Washingon) just cured?

You’re GOOD!

That’s right. Fixed it right up. In monkeys. (Which, at least in your case, isn’t SO far removed.) And he seems optimistic that homo sapiens isn’t too far down this path as well as other vision disorders.

Good one, Dr Neitz.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 9