The Amazing Self-healing System of the Human Body and Research Directions for Future Applications

Introduction

There is a saying that goes, "We are our own best doctors." This is because the human body has a natural and spontaneousself-healing system that allows us to maintain a state of health and avoid losing vitality from external factors such as physical, chemical, and microbial invasions. The self-healing system includes several subsystems such as the immune system, stress system, repair system, endocrine system, and others. When any of these subsystems experiences functional or coordination disorders or encounters external factors that cause damage, the self-healing ability produced by the self-healing system will inevitably decrease, resulting in pathological or sub-healthy states in the organism. Medicine usually cannot directly eliminate symptoms, but it can promote the function of the self-healing system by supplementing the missing elements in the body, thereby achieving the goal of curing the disease. Therefore, modern medicine exists to assist the body's self-healing system in treating diseases.

Hemostasis

There is a very intuitive example about the human body's self-healing ability: when we sustain injuries such as cuts and bleeding, we usually can heal ourselves automatically after a period. This is common knowledge that everyone has. However, the mechanisms underlying this process are not well understood by many. So how does this process actually work？

Step 1: When the human body is injured and the skin is broken, bleeding occurs, which also means that the blood vessels have been damaged. Damage to cells in the blood vessel wall releases chemicals that begin the process of blood clotting.

Step 2: The released chemicals initiate a chain reaction, causing platelets to adhere to the outer side of the cut blood vessel and change shape (activation), bridge to each other (aggregation), and ultimately form a platelet plug. Meanwhile, activated clotting factors convert prothrombin to thrombin, which then converts soluble fibrinogen to insoluble fibrin. Fibrin forms a mesh-like structure, which acts to stabilize the blood clot. The clotting mechanism interacts with other hemostatic mechanisms, especially those involved in the formation of platelet plug, to produce a clot.

Step 3: During the formation of the clot, new releases of the chemicals occur, leading to further acceleration of the clotting process. This is referred to as a "positive feedback loop of clotting acceleration." Ultimately, when enough clotting has occurred, the damaged blood vessel wall is repaired. This is the reason why wounds can be rapidly stopped from bleeding in a very short time

Regeneration

During this process, (a) after the wound stops bleeding, there will be the onset of (b) inflammation, which will naturally disappear as (c) cells proliferate. Eventually, with the production of collagen fiber cells, (d) the reshaping of cells is completed, which is the entire process of wound regeneration (self-healing).

Growth factors

There are several key points worth noting in the above-mentioned self-healing process. First, when bleeding occurs, platelets will aggregate and release growth factors. Growth factors are a type of protein molecule that stimulates cell proliferation and differentiation in the human body, serving as a signaling role. Once the signal is sent out by the growth factors, the human body automatically produces various types of fibroblasts. When these fibroblasts are produced, they not only begin to repair tissues, but also eliminate inflammation. When these fibroblasts are produced and functioning, the human body will continuously produce more fibroblasts to support the healing process in a positive feedback loop until the entire "regeneration" (self-healing) process is complete with the production of collagen fibers.

The utilization and research of human body regeneration mechanism

With the continuous improvement of the understanding and principles of the human body's self-healing mechanism, many medical experts have proposed questions like: whether we can use this natural mechanism to obtain a safe solution to the cell regeneration problems inside the body? Can we use the restoration of certain human tissues to treat diseases caused by the loss or decline of self-regeneration ability due to aging or other reasons?

The discussion range of these questions extends from solving painful (injury or inflammation) conditions in different parts of the body to postoperative repair, and to attempt to resist the signs of aging that were once considered irreversible in the human body, and further to the pathogenicity of some chronic diseases.

Currently, treatment methods that utilize the human body's regeneration mechanism have been successfully applied to various clinical cases worldwide, ranging from more intuitive technical applications such as dental and skin tissue repair after specialized surgeries, to discussions in various fields such as bone pain (osteomyelitis , cervical spondylosis, lumbar spondylosis, osteoarthritis, sports injuries), skin beauty (anti-aging, repair, spot removal, hair growth), and chronic skin diseases (diabetic foot, bedsores).

At the same time, the exploration of new fields has never stopped. For example, whether applying related treatments to human neural tissues can cure health problems caused by degenerative neural diseases, such as the increasing problem of insomnia that many people are facing.