I am seeking confirmation or refutation of the following medical practices:
Do surgeons replacing lost bone sculpt a piece of dead coral into the same shape, insert it, and allow the body’s living tissue to grow around the implant?
Do eye doctors create artificial eyes out of dead coral skeleton?
Have surgeons created a paste out of ground-up coral skeletons to inject into weakened or broken bones?
I have heard of all of these practices, but wish to refrain from reiterating them until I know they are true.
If you have an answer and can cite sources, please do so. Thanks in advance!
“The dawn of a new era is felt and not measured.” Walter Lord
I’m no sawbones but I do know that ceramic is used some joint replacements.
The problem with all replacements is wear. the plastic parts wear out. It would seem to me that coral hardness would be difficult to predict.
This is simply a guess, but I’d find any of those practices very hard to believe. All the coral of which I am aware is quite brittle.In has great strength withing a certain tolerance, then it simply snaps or shatters. I don’t want that inside my body.
A goodly number of corals are very toxic (although I suppose if we could find a non-toxic version we might play with it).
I can’t imagine what ground coral would do in a bone (besides abraid it). I would think you’d want to encourage the body to build up the bone rather than just inserting calcified skeleton dust into an injury.
Artificial eyes are generally glass. Glass is a very cheap, inert substance that can be shaped and bufed smooth very easily. Coral is quite rough, (usually porous, making it hard to put a smooth surface on it), and is rather expensive.
If some medical type shows up to contradict me (and I am guessing), I’d really like to see a site that explains away my objections.
I’m no sawbones either, but I’ve always had an interest in medicine and try to keep up – I’ve never heard of this. My s.o. just had a cervical disk removed and the doc replaced it with cadaver bone (i.e., bone from a dead person).
I hadn’t heard of this, but it sounded interesting so I looked it up and found that it’s true. The varities Porites and Goniopora are the coral usually used, and this is one of the few links I found that wasn’t meant for physicians’ reading: www.newscoast.com/story/Sep-05-1999/wcoral6.htm
There are sites with more technical information if you search for those varieties and “surgery” as your keywords.
Well, that answers my “too brittle” objection. (I notice that they are inserting it for cartilage replacement in the spine. I would be curious to see if they ever attempt to replace a femur with it.)