Alexandra Preston – Whether you are a grade school student or a highly-paid professional athlete, a bone fracture can be a tremendous inconvenience that may involve weeks or months of healing and muscular re-training, especially if the fracture is treated with nothing more than a cast. Is there a better way? Here are the latest techniques that could speed up bone fracture healing and reduce the stress from injury.
Treating Fractures with Ultrasound and Electromagnetic Field Therapy
1. and 2. Low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) and pulsed electromagnetic field therapy (PEMF) are two options used by a number of athletes for promoting repair. A review of 8 studies has noted that both of these treatments can be effective in speeding tibial fracture healing.
One of the papers reviewed found a reduction in healing time of 12 days among non-smokers treated with LIPUS (84 days versus 96 days) for clinical healing, and a reduction of 33 days for healing with PEMF (96 days instead of 129). Even in smokers using these therapies healing time is reduced, 103 days versus 175 in the control group using LIPUS and 96 days versus 175 in the control group using PEMF. Continue reading
Whether you find yourself stranded in a hostile environment, or you’re facing a long term collapse of the grid, you’ve got to learn how to put everything to good use. You have to carefully consider every little thing that you would have normally tossed in the trash. Everything we’ve been taught in our throwaway culture will have to “thrown out”, for lack of a better term. Disregarding our consumerist culture is probably one of the greatest attributes of the Prepper movement, and there is no shortage of survival literature and videos, that reveal some way to improvise mundane objects into useful tools. There’s one thing I rarely hear about though, and perhaps it’s due to its rather macabre nature.