4 ms·

First Transient Electronic Bandage Speeds Healing by 30 Percent

88 points by lxm 4y ago

pimlottc 4y ago
Previous discussion based on an different article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060657
tomxor 4y ago
I cant help but think when reading another paper with a "think of the diabetic masses" spin on it, how much pain an suffering could be avoided if as much focus was put on improving peoples nutrition at market scales. We know now that highly refined carb and sugar based food that makes up 95% of what is sold in the west is pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes, and the more we learn about the effects of the clever substitutes we come up with like sweeteners the more we realise that these are as bad if not worse at increasing insulin resistance. We've created our own diabetes epidemic through technology, using the cost function of yield and profit for food processing, and it feels like we are reaching for technology to also treat the myriad symptoms instead of challenge that cost function to include human health. I'm sure this technology has broad utility beyond diabetes, but people keep including it in every medical paper, maybe it's not really the authors focus. [edit] Judging by votes I seem to have offended people, to be clear I don't blame people for poor diets, and I don't blame diabetics for becoming diabetic, I blame industry. Of course if it's food industry people that I've offended then fuck you :) if other reasons, do explain.
- tenuousemphasis 4y ago
  What you're referring to is a political and economic problem, not a medical or technical problem.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    This is true, but it is a problem enabled by technology at the industrial level. Science could at least help reframe what has come to be accepted as "food".
- xnx 4y ago
  Widespread use of semaglutide might cure metabolic syndrome.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    Nutrition is not that simple, you cannot trick the body with a miracle cure chemical. If you cheat the body of nutrients there will be long term consequences.
  - manmal 4y ago
    Early time restricted feeding (eTRF - eating only from morning until 2PM) has shown promising results in very small studies, but it seems there is no widespread interest in doing more expensive studies.
- devmor 4y ago
  If you look at the food production industry as a whole in the US, the picture of why funding and effort is not put into fixing nutrition becomes very clear. It's extremely profitable AND nearly risk-proof to run monocrop farms to produce varieties of corn, which can be grown as necessary to sell based on what has higher demand in the current season: sweetener, meal, whole ears, biofuel, cattle feed, etc. It's much less profitable to run a farm full of different types of crops that must be grown, harvested, watered and cared for in different ways - and have 1 or 2 markets at most. If you were to create a venn diagram of the share holding firms in major farming operations compared to the shareholders in major food production companies, it would be very close to a circle. Thus, it's in the best interest (as far as turning short-term profits) of those shareholders to ensure high corn production and high corn use, filling our shelves with high-calorie, low-nutrition products. There are many more tangents to go on that end in a similar "hooray, short-term profits" conclusion. To name a few: Heavily-preserved food that can stay on shelves longer, and thus contains too much sodium. Long commutes and work hours that benefit corporations, resulting in high demand for pre-packaged food that has lost many essential nutrients in its preparation method. High rents and housing costs from real estate speculation leading to people having small, inadequate kitchens and ordering food more.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    Yes, these are all fair points, in a nut shell you could blame market forces and say industry behaviour is inevitable, which is what I was alluding to as the cost function. In other areas where this becomes a problem government intervene to change intensives, e.g the total cost of continuous alcohol consumption is not included in the sticker price, so some governments add a tax, same with tobacco... ideally such taxes would be directed to public spending on the medical costs, but that depends on the country. The same could be done far more broadly with food, not just a mere sugar tax, but taxing foods that are known to be product placements as poor substitutes for a full meal, that are too nutritionally devoid and contain too many substitutes. Just like alcohol, an occasional ready meal or highly refined cake isn't going to kill you or give you chronic disease, in which case it can be expensive to dissuade you from making it a regular thing and disincentivise industry from focusing on producing that type of food..
- pengaru 4y ago
  There's far more money to be made running dialysis centers in every strip mall than selling more carrots and broccoli. And don't you dare obstruct the fast path to dialysis because FREEDUM!!!
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    I'll be even more cynical and say that the "upper middle class on up" who's whims drive political policy actively DGAF because exercise and eating healthy are a lifestyle thing that separate them from the people below them.
    - pengaru 4y ago
      Except there are plenty "upper middle class on up" who don't take care of themselves either...
- devbent 4y ago
  > Judging by votes You are mostly off topic. :) Likely no one will disagree with you that the standard American diet is a ultra processed chemical trash heap, just, that is not related to super cool wound healing tech. Diabetes isn't the topic of the article, diabetic ulcers were used in the clinical trial, but otherwise the story is about using electricity to heal open wounds.
  - tomxor 4y ago
    The paper targets diabetic ulcers... it's literally a band aid on diabetes. This is the trend in medical papers currently, target diabetics, which there are so many of. It's really not much of a tangent.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  > pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes 1. You should say Type 2 Diabetes when you're talking about it. Type 1 and Type 2 are vastly different things. Diet and exercise help with making Type 1 easier to manage, but they don't "fix" it in any way. 2. There exist people for whom reducing the effects of Type 2 diabetes is harder than just a simple diet change. Things to help Type 2 can help these people make their lives better.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  I agree with the thrust of your point and said something similar in the previous discussion. But there's a lot we don't understand about diabetes. It's more complicated than just sugar and there's a lot of room to improve our understanding.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  Sure, I think we're all agreed nowadays that drenching everything in corn syrup isn't going great. The answer we don't have is: What's actually better, at the same scale? All the current offerings are for people who want to eat tofu-and-beet-juice patties, or eat lentils everyday, or drink some ever-changing goop of "meal replacement shakes." No one's really cracked the code on finding foods that are both healthy and scalable.
  - Super_Jambo 4y ago
    Aren't ya'll subsidizing the crap out of corn? This seems kinda "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" to me.
nighthawk454 4y ago
My first "in mice"! @dang, perhaps should add it to the title
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
hknmtt 4y ago
imagine the suffering of animals that had to be tortured for this to hit the market.
bilekas 4y ago
> When the wound is healed, the flower-shaped electrode simply dissolves into the body, bypassing the need to retrieve it. This is probably the most incredible tech discovery of all this to me. Insane how it can just be absorbed by the body with no side-effects.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  > The team made the electrodes from a metal called molybdenum, which is widely used in electronic and semiconductor applications. They discovered that when molybdenum is thin enough, it can biodegrade. Furthermore, it does not interfere with the healing process. Fda limits the metal to 2 mg a day.
  - DoreenMichele 4y ago
    Most likely, it's not an issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 I mean unless they stick a bunch of these mini electrodes all over you.
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  > with no side-effects Citation and years needed...
  - victorbjorklund 4y ago
    It is less than the recommended dosage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 (sure if you also get from food it might end up more but the upperlimit is probably way higher than the RDA)
- knodi123 4y ago
  I had a steel splinter in my thumb once. It turned gray, and then just faded, over a span of 6 months or so. I was disappointed, because I could use it to feel magnetic fields, which was really neat.

88 points by lxm 4y ago

Previous discussion based on an different article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35060657

tomxor 4y ago

I cant help but think when reading another paper with a "think of the diabetic masses" spin on it, how much pain an suffering could be avoided if as much focus was put on improving peoples nutrition at market scales. We know now that highly refined carb and sugar based food that makes up 95% of what is sold in the west is pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes, and the more we learn about the effects of the clever substitutes we come up with like sweeteners the more we realise that these are as bad if not worse at increasing insulin resistance. We've created our own diabetes epidemic through technology, using the cost function of yield and profit for food processing, and it feels like we are reaching for technology to also treat the myriad symptoms instead of challenge that cost function to include human health. I'm sure this technology has broad utility beyond diabetes, but people keep including it in every medical paper, maybe it's not really the authors focus. [edit] Judging by votes I seem to have offended people, to be clear I don't blame people for poor diets, and I don't blame diabetics for becoming diabetic, I blame industry. Of course if it's food industry people that I've offended then fuck you :) if other reasons, do explain.

tenuousemphasis 4y ago
What you're referring to is a political and economic problem, not a medical or technical problem.
- tomxor 4y ago
  This is true, but it is a problem enabled by technology at the industrial level. Science could at least help reframe what has come to be accepted as "food".
xnx 4y ago
Widespread use of semaglutide might cure metabolic syndrome.
- tomxor 4y ago
  Nutrition is not that simple, you cannot trick the body with a miracle cure chemical. If you cheat the body of nutrients there will be long term consequences.
- manmal 4y ago
  Early time restricted feeding (eTRF - eating only from morning until 2PM) has shown promising results in very small studies, but it seems there is no widespread interest in doing more expensive studies.
devmor 4y ago
If you look at the food production industry as a whole in the US, the picture of why funding and effort is not put into fixing nutrition becomes very clear. It's extremely profitable AND nearly risk-proof to run monocrop farms to produce varieties of corn, which can be grown as necessary to sell based on what has higher demand in the current season: sweetener, meal, whole ears, biofuel, cattle feed, etc. It's much less profitable to run a farm full of different types of crops that must be grown, harvested, watered and cared for in different ways - and have 1 or 2 markets at most. If you were to create a venn diagram of the share holding firms in major farming operations compared to the shareholders in major food production companies, it would be very close to a circle. Thus, it's in the best interest (as far as turning short-term profits) of those shareholders to ensure high corn production and high corn use, filling our shelves with high-calorie, low-nutrition products. There are many more tangents to go on that end in a similar "hooray, short-term profits" conclusion. To name a few: Heavily-preserved food that can stay on shelves longer, and thus contains too much sodium. Long commutes and work hours that benefit corporations, resulting in high demand for pre-packaged food that has lost many essential nutrients in its preparation method. High rents and housing costs from real estate speculation leading to people having small, inadequate kitchens and ordering food more.
- tomxor 4y ago
  Yes, these are all fair points, in a nut shell you could blame market forces and say industry behaviour is inevitable, which is what I was alluding to as the cost function. In other areas where this becomes a problem government intervene to change intensives, e.g the total cost of continuous alcohol consumption is not included in the sticker price, so some governments add a tax, same with tobacco... ideally such taxes would be directed to public spending on the medical costs, but that depends on the country. The same could be done far more broadly with food, not just a mere sugar tax, but taxing foods that are known to be product placements as poor substitutes for a full meal, that are too nutritionally devoid and contain too many substitutes. Just like alcohol, an occasional ready meal or highly refined cake isn't going to kill you or give you chronic disease, in which case it can be expensive to dissuade you from making it a regular thing and disincentivise industry from focusing on producing that type of food..
pengaru 4y ago
There's far more money to be made running dialysis centers in every strip mall than selling more carrots and broccoli. And don't you dare obstruct the fast path to dialysis because FREEDUM!!!
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  I'll be even more cynical and say that the "upper middle class on up" who's whims drive political policy actively DGAF because exercise and eating healthy are a lifestyle thing that separate them from the people below them.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    Except there are plenty "upper middle class on up" who don't take care of themselves either...
devbent 4y ago
> Judging by votes You are mostly off topic. :) Likely no one will disagree with you that the standard American diet is a ultra processed chemical trash heap, just, that is not related to super cool wound healing tech. Diabetes isn't the topic of the article, diabetic ulcers were used in the clinical trial, but otherwise the story is about using electricity to heal open wounds.
- tomxor 4y ago
  The paper targets diabetic ulcers... it's literally a band aid on diabetes. This is the trend in medical papers currently, target diabetics, which there are so many of. It's really not much of a tangent.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
RHSeeger 4y ago
> pretty much singularly responsible for diabetes 1. You should say Type 2 Diabetes when you're talking about it. Type 1 and Type 2 are vastly different things. Diet and exercise help with making Type 1 easier to manage, but they don't "fix" it in any way. 2. There exist people for whom reducing the effects of Type 2 diabetes is harder than just a simple diet change. Things to help Type 2 can help these people make their lives better.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
I agree with the thrust of your point and said something similar in the previous discussion. But there's a lot we don't understand about diabetes. It's more complicated than just sugar and there's a lot of room to improve our understanding.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
Sure, I think we're all agreed nowadays that drenching everything in corn syrup isn't going great. The answer we don't have is: What's actually better, at the same scale? All the current offerings are for people who want to eat tofu-and-beet-juice patties, or eat lentils everyday, or drink some ever-changing goop of "meal replacement shakes." No one's really cracked the code on finding foods that are both healthy and scalable.
- Super_Jambo 4y ago
  Aren't ya'll subsidizing the crap out of corn? This seems kinda "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" to me.

nighthawk454 4y ago

My first "in mice"! @dang, perhaps should add it to the title

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

hknmtt 4y ago

imagine the suffering of animals that had to be tortured for this to hit the market.

bilekas 4y ago

> When the wound is healed, the flower-shaped electrode simply dissolves into the body, bypassing the need to retrieve it. This is probably the most incredible tech discovery of all this to me. Insane how it can just be absorbed by the body with no side-effects.

bioemerl 4y ago
> The team made the electrodes from a metal called molybdenum, which is widely used in electronic and semiconductor applications. They discovered that when molybdenum is thin enough, it can biodegrade. Furthermore, it does not interfere with the healing process. Fda limits the metal to 2 mg a day.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  Most likely, it's not an issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 I mean unless they stick a bunch of these mini electrodes all over you.
reducesuffering 4y ago
> with no side-effects Citation and years needed...
- victorbjorklund 4y ago
  It is less than the recommended dosage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074916 (sure if you also get from food it might end up more but the upperlimit is probably way higher than the RDA)
knodi123 4y ago
I had a steel splinter in my thumb once. It turned gray, and then just faded, over a span of 6 months or so. I was disappointed, because I could use it to feel magnetic fields, which was really neat.