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Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

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Re: Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

#31
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cyberpunk back-alley clinic where you'd have something like this done will give you a piece of leather to bite on at no additional cost.

Don't forget that it's health care in the US, so it'll be the same piece of leather everyone else has used, but wiped down with a Clorox wipe.

$3000 to rent the leather. $649 for the wipe.

Re: Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that it's health care in the US, so it'll be the same piece of leather everyone else has used, but wiped down with a Clorox wipe.

$3000 to rent the leather. $649 for the wipe.

don't forget the office visit fees for the 35.32 seconds the doctor was actually present in the room.

Re: Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

#34

I had to go to the dentist’s yesterday and while looking at some pics I thought the idea of literally screwing in an implant tooth in your gum to be pretty damn crude, primitive even. It would be cool if we could inject some artificial 3D printing thingies in the gum that feed on nutrients from your body and slowly create a new tooth as programmed beforehand. Such robotic thingies could also be used to build new bone…

I think something similar every time I look at the massive scar on my ankle where I had a steel plate installed after an injury. This is going to seem tremendously primitive sometime soon.

I have a scar from my breastbone around curving up my back, tracing the route of a rib. When I was 12 I had heart surgery, and that's how they did it back then.

My new doctor was amazed - said I'm a walking museum. That technique lasted just a couple of years before they turned to poking holes and putting cameras and instruments through the holes.

I guess most of medicine seems pretty primitive to what we had even a few years back!

Re: Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

#35

I have a 3d printer at home... that's gonna be a huge pill to swallow!

Soon in youtube: "DIY stomach reduction at your own home for dummies, ask Phil".

In fact starting with stomach reduction sounds like a low hanging fruit with a bigger target, wide safety interval, less nerves sunbathing in the middle of the road and much less prone to legal troubles (as long as the material would support strong acids without leaking anything nasty).

Maybe in the future we could print something low-caloric content that would disintegrate slowly in some weeks to help obese people with their diets.

Re: Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

#38

I had to go to the dentist’s yesterday and while looking at some pics I thought the idea of literally screwing in an implant tooth in your gum to be pretty damn crude, primitive even. It would be cool if we could inject some artificial 3D printing thingies in the gum that feed on nutrients from your body and slowly create a new tooth as programmed beforehand. Such robotic thingies could also be used to build new bone…

I recently got the implant pitch from my dentist, and we’re already dipping our toes into that. When you extract a molar, they fill the hole with “bone chips” that the bone cells expand into. This not only speeds up the healing process, it augments it. You get a stronger (less weak, really) jaw with it than just letting nature take its course. That material can be sterilized cow, or human bone, but they are also moving to a synthetic material. I’m not sure if that’s 3D printed or fired like aerogel. Seems like it could be either.

Right now it sounds they use small pieces and just pack them into the channels like pebbles, I suspect we could tailor the grafts to the hole, improving the outcomes incrementally. For instance, printing a convex wrap on the post of the implant that can slide into the hole and fill most of it (we know bones only need proximity not contact in order to repair. This is a nasty trick they use to make people with dwarfism taller, by breaking the leg bones and then not letting them fuse, causing the gap to fill up with new bone).

Re: Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That roughly follows some proposed applications of stem cell therapy. Why invent a nanomachine swarm when we are all nanomachine swarms?

Some people really dislike when Grog try to play God, either for misguided religious reasons or somewhat reasonable comprehension of the sheer scale of human ignorance in regards to biological systems.

Icarus is just one of the oldest tellings of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Can we/should we doesn’t require technology to become a problem, but it sure makes for a stunning light show.

A lot of civics comes down to can we/should we as well, and that doesn’t take any technology at all. It’s just a social dystopia instead of a technological one.

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