Injury Recovery Support

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Fast Track:

• First Aid
• Second Aid

Overview

Injury recovery is always rate limited by something. The question is what…

This HowTo provides a general guideline to optimize healing for injuries with primary focus on joint and connective tissue. We assert there are three cofactors in injury in any healing rate:

Building Materials Garbage Disposal Energy

Cells know how to put themselves back together. The challenge is to optimize the environment so they can do it as quickly as possible.

Rapid healing is a survival advantage – and is not fundamentally limited by the organism, but by the efficiency of the organism repairing itself.

Injury Basics

Several factors that govern the injury process:

1. Initial trauma damages tissues;
2. Inflammatory process "closes off" the injury area (and sacrifices nearby tissue);
3. Reconstruction restores the area to normal.

Accelerated recovery therapy involves three principles:

• Manage inflammation to minimize secondary damage;
• Optimize nutrients including oxygen during recovery;
• Optimize waste product flow out of the injury area.

Modulated Inflammation

Inflammation is a balance of good and bad. Good: Inflammation causes the body to initiate healing. Bad: Inflammation inhibits nutrient delivery and waste disposal from the damaged area. Caveat: inflammation causes secondary damage where adjacent tissue dies, inflates the healing job beyond the initial damage. This image shows a zone of necrotic tissue around the original injury. Note the "dead zone" is much bigger than the apparent trauma area.

Secondary damage that develops after the initial trauma, usually represents the bulk of tissue. Minimizing the "secondary damage" by controlling initial inflammation limits the amount of healing required. Anything which reduces secondary damage reduces healing time because it makes for less healing.

An initial trauma causes plasma and lymphocytes to flow to an area. This movement brings the both nutrients and oxygen to support the healing process.

Plasma oxygen saturation has two influences:

• Oxygen and nutrient rich plasma enables more tissue near the injury to survive while depleted plasma permits more local damage. Oxygen/nutrient availability is inversely proportional to inflammatory tissue damage;
• Healing efficiency for non-vascular tissue is proportional to the nutrients and oxygen available in the plasma;
• Post traumatic Oxygen/Nutrient availability results from plasma concentration and mobility of the plasma.

These factors control the healing speed. Individuals with high plasma oxygen levels and successful digestion heal much faster, up to 10x, than expected:

1. Less secondary damage from inflammation;
2. Connective tissue has more energy, oxygen and nutrients to rebuild itself.

Diffusion Nutrient Pathways

Non vascular tissue, aka slow healing tissue, must receive nutrients and oxygen by diffusion, or plasma transport, which occur independent blood flow. Blood flow is important because it gets nutrients and oxygen as close as possible to a target area so that nutrients/oxygen diffuse shorter distances.

Connective tissue does not have capillaries which bring blood close to connective tissue. Nutrients and oxygen must reach these tissues by other mechanisms.

Chronic issues with tendon and ligaments, like tendonitis, etc. reflect metabolic breakdown in non-vascular tissue. Deterioration in diffusion pathways that deliver nutrients and oxygen cause tendonitis and chronic connective tissue issues. Diffusion pathway breakdown has multiple factors that inhibit or prevent healing: Decreased nutrient/oxygen solubility from local trauma toxins; Trauma stress reduces systemic oxygen availability (Manfred von Ardenne); Trauma increases systemic nutrient demands, which decrease local availability.

Note the bulk of the connective tissues. The efficiency of diffusion mechanisms control nutrient and oxygen availability to connective tissue.

Injury amplifies the diffusion pathway challenge. Concurrent damage to vascular structure, and waste from damaged cells further inhibit or block diffusion pathways. This is why connective tissue heals slowly compared to vascularized tissue, muscle, bone, etc. Diffusion is the statistical process of dispersion based on random motion instead of directed flow.

From a therapy view, restoration of diffusion pathway performance accelerates healing of non-vascularized tissue. The Model:

1. Limit damage with inflammation management,
2. Restore vascular performance;
3. Support Cleanup;
4. Optimize Saturate Nutrient Mobility
5. Supply systemic Saturate Nutrients;
6. Maximize Tissue Oxygen to injury with saturate pathways.