This is an exciting technological development, unrelated to Chinese medicine but fascinating nonetheless.
It’s also worthy of note that medical qigong techniques can reduce the amount of time it takes for bone fractures to heal. So Western and Chinese medicine can go hand in hand.
Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue.
At the Istec laboratory of bioceramics in Faenza near Bologna, a herd of sheep have already been implanted with the bones.
The process starts by cutting the long tubular rattan wood up into manageable pieces.
It is then snipped into even smaller chunks, ready for the complex chemical process to begin.
The pieces are put in a furnace and heated.
In simple terms, carbon and calcium are added.
The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced.