No one likes to wear a cast. Whenever someone breaks a bone, their first question is: When does this cast come off? And the second question is: What can I do to get it off faster?
There is a lot of research going into bone healing, and we are going to highlight a few interesting facts.
Before we get started, its important to understand what our bones are, and how they heal.
Bones are actually more than a brick of calcium. They are more like trees. Bones are made of calcium, yes, but they also contain living cells and they are constantly growing and repairing themselves from the daily stress they experience. Our blood (like the water of a tree) delivers nutrients and oxygen that is necessary for our bone cells to live and function. After a bone breaks, it relies on our blood to deliver the nutrients (think building materials) to fill-in the break.
1. Stop Smoking: Its been well proven that smoking has a huge effect on preventing a broken bone from healing. Sometimes it prevents the bone from ever healing. The nicotiene in tobacco causes spasms in your small arteries and prevents nutrients from reaching the site of injury. Without building supplies, your bone will not heal (see article).
2. Eat a healthy diet. People with diabetes that is not being controlled (meaning the level of sugar is too high in their blood stream) have been shown to have problems healing broken bones. Instead of receiving building-supplies like growth factors from the blood, a diabetic only gets laffy taffy (see article).
3. Stock up on Vitamin D: One study looked at 37 people that failed to heal their broken bone, even though everything at first seemed normal. Further inspection showed vitamin d deficiencies in some of the patients, and when their levels were returned to normal, 25% of patients showed new signs of healing (see article).
