E-bandages lightly zap and heal wounds | Hacker News Reader

E-bandages lightly zap and heal wounds

spectrum.ieee.org

168 pointsgmays64 comments

It's absolutely not crazy talk that electrical current in the body is likely relevant to the healing process.

Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disorder that makes people extremely vulnerable to infection, though I don't think current medical science knows why. It's a salt wasting condition and salt is an electrolyte.

The most common test for CF is a sweat chloride test which basically determines how salty you sweat is. A lesser known test is the nasal potential difference test which measures how out of whack your body is for electrical current.

https://cysticfibrosisnewstoday.com/cystic-fibrosis-diagnosi...

The only immediately obvious problem I can suggest for the idea of e-bandages is the same one I so frequently have with modern medicine: it strikes me as being pursued or optimized for making money, not healing patients.

The article cites issues with diabetes. Cystic fibrosis puts one at risk for a little known form of diabetes called Cystic Fibrosis Related Disbetes (CFRD).

It seems to me that there is plenty of room for upping our game on understanding how and why the body chemistry gets out of whack such that it interferes with electrical current in the body and providing dietary suggestions for how to prevent and/or reverse such.

But, of course, that's probably not going to lead to a patent that could potentially make someone very wealthy, so it's unlikely to be pursued, promoted, etc.

> being pursued or optimized for making money, not healing patients

This is a strange complaint to levy on an article describing a real breakthrough.

> that's probably not going to lead to a patent that could potentially make someone very wealthy

Plenty of industry is focussed on dietary suggestions. Diets and supplements that augment one's electro-potential is an obvious marketing win. That said, it seems a local induced current or field would cure such problems more directly than fussing with diet, which causes a general effect across the body.

Our current so-called Healthcare system monetizes treatment, not cures. They make their money on treating you, not on getting you well, keeping you well or preventing problems. Unsurprisingly, we have a lot of chronic ailments -- because that's where the money is.

The wounds that don't want to heal for diabetes patients grow out of a general deterioration of the body chemistry generally. If we had a clearer idea of exactly where things go wrong, preventing the chemical states which foster wounds that don't heal would be a superior method.

Once the general body chemistry has deteriorated that far, fixing the current wound is merely fixing the presenting problem. It points to a much larger problem, one which will likely keep fostering new wounds that are resistant to healing and this general deterioration is likely to eventually kill them.

I wondered why electricity would help a wound heal in the first place.

> The inflammation associated with these wounds can disrupt the body’s normal electric signals, impeding the migration of new cells that can support the healing process.

Honestly, that is indistinguishable from the crystal mumbojumbo you get. And it feels like we're at the magic/science interface with electrotherapy.

That said it is somewhat suspect, and the hypothesis is not really falsifiable by the experiment which is why the journal article itself is not claiming to test that. It is really disappointing that IEEE didn't actually link to or name the article directly. Very poor science journalism there.

The article is that they observed this process working, not why it works. Maybe it works because it kills bacteria...?

Nope ion concentration gradients (which also manifest as electrical potentials) serve to guide everything from white blood cells to the precursors of both replacement and scar tissue. You can mimic this signal directly by applying a potential difference.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10849...

I saw a lecture on bio electricity and it blew my mind. I love areas of science that seem like crystal woo that turn out to be legit. Scientific groupthink creates many opportunities…

it’s disappointing to me that there’s never been a real double-blind study into healing crystals. yeah they’re very clearly placebic woo woo, but the fact that no one’s even thoroughly looked at it is a little sad. RIP James Randi

I'm more surprised that auriculotherapy was recognised by the WHO and I still struggle to find rich medical literature on the subject (maybe looking in the wrong places) although I must admit it helped me a lot, placebo or not (sure didn't feel like one... The reactions and changes were, in my case, drastic to say the least - I haven't had a painful migraine in 10 years - though I still get the other symptoms but no pain, thank doc or my gullible brain).

Regardless of the low level effect, if there was a measurable difference, wouldn't it be fairly trivial to have a trial where people measure healing time of this vs a normal bandage, to see if the difference is statistically significant?

The first (small) paragraph reads:

> The first electronic bandage the body can absorb can apply electric signals to speed the healing of wounds by 30 percent, a new study finds.

the study[1], since TFA does not link to it

[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4687

You should look into the book The Body Electric. The ability of electricity to heal (the doctor in the book even reports some instances of finger regrowth in humans) is remarkable.

Good to see Robert O. Becker finally getting some recognition for a lifetime of work.

Reminds me a bit of Michael Levin's work, where they use electrical signals to cause organisms to regrow limbs.

This sounds amazing. What animal?

I suppose it's probably an unrelated effect, but electron beams are often used for sterilizing things like food, medical packaging, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron-beam_processing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation#Electron_beam

your cells are sensitive to charge in general - cells attempt to maintain certain voltage differentials across their membranes via ion channels in the cell membrane, can communicate voltage information with each other via gap junctions, etc. That electrical communication does control how cells behave.

If you have 20 minutes to watch this ted talk interview I highly recommend it. My mind was blown. Your DNA determines the hardware, but there's a lot of non chemical communication that goes on between cells that determine how they behave.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XheAMrS8Q1c

Once you realize that cells can effectively communicate with each other via voltage, things like whats described about electrical bandages become less surprising.

If you've got a little more time (2 hours) there's a much longer more detailed interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0TNfysTazc

This is some next level stuff. Imagine DNA describes what your hardware looks like, but the software your cells run may be bioelectrical in large enough ways to consider that maybe your skin has some level cognition.

That TED talk was great! Hoping to watch the other video tonight, thanks for sharing

I go back and watch that 2 hour talk every couple months.

The “migration of new cells”? I thought new cells would grow in place; do they really migrate from elsewhere?

They come from blood stream, bone marrow, surrounding tissues etc

We use a zinc based cream to speed up healing after the wound has closed as it reduces inflammation and helps reduce scar tissue forming. Any cream with zinc oxide will do. It's a pretty magic ingredient.

Even backed up by science :).

Zinc cream used to also be pretty common, applied to the nose, as a sunscreen in Australia.

Effective, and attractive!

It's just an all around great cream for anything that is inflamed or needs protection.

Would my body absorbing this metal be detrimental to my health in other ways?

I imagine a tiny amount would be okay, based on the scientists' reactions. However, I wonder if chronic use of this, which is how it'd be for diabetics, would actually lead to bad consequences. Perhaps the material is specifically tailored to be not just prone to absorption but also neutral/positive when processed by the body?

There's a lot of medical technology that involves sticking metal inside of people permanently, as long as they're making it out of the right kind of metal it's hard to believe it would be an issue to stick it on your skin.

The article notes it doesn't just sit on your skin, but is designed to break down and be absorbed as the wound heals. So the amount of metal is a legit concern.

And they always get it right, like cobalt in hip replacements.

I once dissected a titanium knee replacement that had been implanted in a human. The surrounding tissue was steel-grey from metallosis.

My mother had a metal mesh implant for a knee injury in the 70's and later had to have it extracted and her entire knee replaced.

Isn't that a unique property of titanium and part of why it's chosen for skeletal implants?

When a buddy got a damaged tooth replaced with an implant, he showed me medical scans of the titanium rod in-situ with the surrounding bone highlighted as growing into the rod as if they had an affinity for one another. It was part of a document explaining the safety and why titanium was chosen, how the body doesn't reject the material as foreign etc.

I have metal in my body planted without my consent via an explosive device and the doctors don't care to take it out. The risk of infection outweighs the risk of it staying in my body.

A tip of the hat to those with special medical letters for airport security scans.

AFAICT recommended max daily dose of molybdenum is 2mg per day. Above that it starts to get pretty nasty

There are a lot of metals in your diet. Iron and sodium are most famous, but others are present too. You need a little of most of them, but too much can be toxic. Probably there's a lot in this thing; it's not clear from the article if it's enough to cause a problem.

Acute toxicity of molybdenum (Mo), the metal in question, has not been seen in humans, and the toxicity depends strongly on the chemical state.

Studies on rats show a median lethal dose (LD50) as low as 180 mg/kg for some Mo compounds.

Although human toxicity data is unavailable, animal studies have shown that chronic ingestion of more than 10 mg/day of molybdenum can cause diarrhea, growth retardation, infertility, low birth weight, and gout; it can also affect the lungs, kidneys, and liver

I'm no doctor, but that does sound rather unpleasant.

180mg/kg is 10 grams for a 55 kg (=fairly lightweight) human.

Also, 10mg/day in which animals? I would guess animals that are a lot smaller than humans, possibly even mice (weight: less than 1/1000 of that of a human)

The study, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4687 suggests in figure 1 that the device is 0.5mg of molybdenum and dissolves over an 18 day period, ~30µg/day. This is less than your recommended dietary allowance of 45µg/day and about two orders of magnitude under the tolerable upper intake level.

You will also find in the study analysis of what compounds the molybdenum forms as it dissolves.

Also, who knew they were supposed to be getting molybdenum every day? Somehow I feel a bit more cyborgy now, like maybe there is a tiny gear in me somewhere that needs to be greased.

There's a very big difference between ingesting products and having them absorbed in your body differently.

Depending on the product, sure. However, metals aren’t (as far as I know, there are probably exceptions) metabolized by the GI system, apart from being absorbed in to the bloodstream which would be equivalent to this. I have no idea how it could interact with surrounding tissue, that might be an issue but probably pretty unlikely.

There are transporter proteins for metals, eg Ceruloplasmin for copper and iron. I don’t know about molybdenum though, and think that tissue accumulation should at least be considered here.

Pure conjecture: I wonder if this would help against drug-resistant bacteria wounds?

Not conjecture :) This is actively of interest in that area. One of the researchers down the hall from me is working on it.

Wow, cool! Can you give any indication of the prospects? I'm wondering if there's a way that charge gradients can be exploited to advantage our tissues and disadvantage the bacteria...

I'll see if I can catch up with him. Candidly, the last few years have been...disruptive...to a lot of disease research.

I wonder if this team has considered making the electrodes out of silver? Robert O. Becker had great success accelerating the healing of bone tissue using similar methods. Seems like this would avoid any toxicity issues.

relevant: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/08/1161897128/how-researchers-ar...

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL46578399M/We_Are_Electric

This sounds cool but its usefulness seems limited.

Why is healing wounds limited purpose?

It seems very small. There doesn't seem much advantage in healing such small wounds 30% faster. It doesn't seem like a sure thing that it can scale to larger wounds; will it be able to generate the same amount of electricity over a larger area? Also it seems like it would help only with surface wounds; it doesn't seem like it will help with deeper wounds were healing speed would matter more. Then we have to consider factors such as costs. Does the marginal utility justify the extra costs? But who knows, maybe there is a very specific niche for this.

Just because a wound is small doesn’t mean it’s easy to heal. I had a foot wound that took over a _year_, and that was staying off my feet 95% of the time.

Most of that year is was approx penny sized.

For those suffering from diabetes, small wounds can become a very big deal. Even without diabetes, depending on the wound location, it cannot heal in time (say for example a cut on your dominant hand's index finger which one would use very often and mechanically breaking the healing process) and risks infection.

Mary Shelley had the right idea

How can you “lightly” zap something? Like Oh I’m gonna shoot the moon on this pocket scooter .. no buddy

The Curiosity Daily podcast covered this a few days ago.

The podcast is a daily 15 minutes where the hosts present science topics like this in a more casual friendly way. One person tells the other about the contents of the article and then have a back and forth discussion on the key points or to clarify things that were left out. It's a pretty good way to get a quick idea of the latest scientific research in an easy to digest format.

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnR...

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Was yours? Meat-brain here... (that sounds rude, not intended!)

The internet is going to be ruined by AI. I see myself falling for it even now as AI becomes more mainstream. "I don't think that's true, that writing style sounds like AI to me".

The quality of text content from "unverified" sources is going to keep degrading until the "open web" has the same quality of content that recipe sites do today (except the "this is actually the thing you want" is going to be lost in the AI generated garbage.

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

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Someone did make a ChatGPT/AI podcast that reads and talks about the articles on the front page of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34990229

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