It's always fascinating to see how they attempt to study things like this. Press releases put these broad sweeping titles on articles that make it sound to the

It's always fascinating to see how they attempt to study things like this. Press releases put these broad sweeping titles on articles that make it sound to the lay observer like some sort of interventional trial was done in humans tracking some outcome we care about like time to full function return or level of permanent impairment, after incurring otherwise similar levels of tissue damage. Then you read it and it's dead rabbit tissue put into a machine that simulates repetitive stress and the outcome measured isn't actually healing (because dead tissue can't heal), but the expression of anabolic genes known to be associated with healing in live animals. I'm sure it's interesting work and far more feasible to do than a proper RCT, which is almost certainly illegal because you can't randomly select humans and injure them. The best way to simulate an RCT is to select people who are already injured, but then to ensure there is some comparability in the level of injury, you'd likely need to look at athletes, in sports played by both men and women, and only look at non-contact injuries. The controls to get reliable data start to become onerous quickly. So it's far easier to cut dead meat off an animal and put it in a simulator. Readers just need to be aware of the limitations of mechanistic studies in non-human subjects, especially when it involves artificial stimulus of excised tissue and not even injuring real rabbits. The results don't support a title like this. The researchers realize this. Other scientists reading their results realize this. But consumers of science and health content in the news reading press releases do not realize this and end up forming this broad web of reinforced "facts" they believe in that they think have scientific backing behind them, when in reality they very much do not.