Bone Harvesting

A woman told me that she had food surgery & they sprinkled cadaver bone in her foot. Since then she's had a deep love for hiking which she never had before. Now she hikes 3 days a week & thinks it's due to the influence of the DNA in the sprinkled bone. Someone else mentioned that her oral surgeon wanted to use ground cadaver bone to rebuild some of her bone in her mouth for implants. She declined, as she was creeped out by the idea of a "ground-up dead person" inside her mouth!

I wasn't much aware of this practice, but it is quite common for bone surgeries and dental implants. Allogenic bone is harvested from a cadaver, then freeze-dried with water extraction. the water via a vacuum. There are "Bone Banks" where the material is stored and can be provided to doctors in a variety of forms, including chips, powders and gels. In the body, these fragments serve as a scaffolding for new bone to grow and fill in the injured area.

This practice is conducted with animal bones as well, usually cow bones. This bone is referred to as Xenogenic, and the bone is processed at high temperatures to assure no contamination is present. A third option for bone grafts are autogenic, where the bone is taken from the patients own living bone. This is advantageous because the bone is still alive, and can serve as the means for new bone formation as well. However, this often requires additional surgery to aquire the material in the first place.