I have always been intrigued by the muscular breakdown process during exercise. When exercising beyond your capabilities the next day you have pain and your muscles ache. But it does not help with muscle growth. In fact athletes know this and try to avoid using different techniques. (Those who cheat know that using steroids actually helps with minimizing muscular damage so they can exercise more, stimulating muscle build-up.) Then if you go for a blood test you will have the CK enzyme elevated. So what exactly happens to your dead cells after muscular breakdown?
Then i said to myself. Your own dead cells contain DNA fragments (if
DNA theory is true) that can be used in different areas of the body if needed, like in heart, better than from any other source. What if when exercising your body deliberately creates muscular breakdown in areas of your body and uses the cellular remains to rebuild your damaged heart or increase heart muscle?
If this is true, how many times this process can repeat itself until your heart is not fixable anymore?
Maybe even during CPR, where sometimes there is required energetic action from the part of the reviver, some breakdown occurs in the chest area where rhythmic pressure is applied.
Then thinking even further. Maybe heart muscle can be regenerated indefinetley. And it may be a quick process, a matter of hours or even dozens of minutes. Cause that'a how long a moderate muscular breakdown lasts.
How about the nerve circuits that synchronize heart? If you take a heart cell and put it in a Petri dish with nutrients it will continue to contract, rhythmically. All heart cells can do that including the new ones. The problem is how to synchronize them. And that can take a little longer until new nerve circuits build and train themselves. In this interval, fibrillation may occasionally occur. So now how do you fix that?
Defibrillator is one way this may be done. There are people with implanted defibrilators. I always wondered why they only work occasionally. Maybe just only when the heart is at the end of a decompensated regeneration cycle. When muscle buildup has been to great to be retrained by heart's own means.
But they might exist other more or less "natural" methods. I think of the entrained walking. When one person can walk in the same rhythm of the beating heart. Some nerve impulses from other parts of the body can overlap the heart electric currents and help with the retraining process. Other methods can be brain entraining through music or noise, breath entraining, etc. Even mantras, or poetry.
I was looking on the web for a memorable phrase the guy from
Computer Age Auto Service
once told me, citing the Bible. It was roughly the equivalent of "in
the end times people will eat their own flesh" or something like that.
But there is no such thing in the Bible. He might have said one of the
verses from the Bible like from Ezekiel and i didn't get it right. I was
pretty messed up that day as not sleeping for days and prepared for
that conversation.
On another occasion one of the more
senior programers at Quadramed told me something about one's body
consuming itself when starving. He specified that we consume our own
muscles for staying alive when fasting.
Yet on another
occasion a therapist in a hospital told me that we can use our own body
fat to convert it into sugar and keep going. However that is not true.
Fat can only be used for keeping body temperature and for a few other
"minor" things. To have your body and especially your brain functioning
you need glucose or other sugars. I think protein can be broken down to
either fat or sugar.
However in all tree instances
above your body shuffles his own muscles or fat in order to survive.
