Broken bones can be intensely painful, and, unless properly cared for, broken bo

Question

Broken bones can be intensely painful, and, unless properly cared for, broken bones may cause future deformities or movement difficulties.

Assume, it is the year 2075, and "modern medicine" has come a long way. In this scenario, imagine that you are a Paramedic, and you have responded to a call where a child has fallen from playground equipment. Please fill in the blanks.

First, you observe the patient. The patient appears well-nourished, healthy and young, making it highly unlikely that this bone break is a spontaneous fracture, as can occur due to a bone disease called ________, a disease occurring most frequently in elderly white females, and results in bone loss and curvature of the spine. Next, you observed the injury carefully. The injury to the arm is a broken bone. You know the bone is broken because you observe the broken bone protruding through the skin. You can see that the broken bone is located in the upper arm, between the shoulder and the elbow. This bone, called the ________, is part of the ______ skeleton. Because the bone is visible to you, you know that the bone is protruding through the uppermost layer of the skin, which you have learned is a type of tissue known as _______tissue.  

Next, you consider the damage that may have occurred as the injury took place. As the broken bone moved from its normal location within the arm to protrude through the skin, the broken edge first passed through a type of muscle tissue, called ________ muscle, in the arm. Immediately after the injury occurred, your patient began to experience swelling and warmth around the injury, and pain. These early symptoms indicate that the body began to repair tissues to restore homeostasis.

You begin to consider your steps to healing the break. Remember, it's the year 2075. Let's assume that you have a nifty handheld portable x-ray wand, and can view the microscopic anatomy of this broken bone. You can see that the bone broke in a section that consists of very dense bone surrounding the marrow cavity, which means that this fracture occurred in this type,_________ , of bone. Your young patient is fortunate that the break did not occur in the area of bone growth, called the ________ plate, which means that the growth of the bone will not be affected.

You run a newfangled magnetic apparatus above and around the break, which painlessly moves the bone back into its original, unbroken position. You next apply a new and cutting edge medicine which stimulates bone cells, known as ________ cells, to begin to build new bone along the broken edges. The medicine cannot diffuse into the existing bone cells, but the cellular energy of ATP is used to move the molecules into the cells, in a process known as an ________ process. In order to fill in the broken edges, the cells along the edges of the break begin to rapidly divide to create "daughter cells," in a process known as _______.

Within moments, your fully-healed and pain-free patient scampers back to the playset and lunges for the metal bars of the playset ladder..... but we'll save the rest of the story for another scenario.

Explanation / Answer

Osteoporosis

Humerus

Appendicular

Epidermal

Striated muscle

Diaphysis/shaft

Osteochondral plate

Osteoblast

Active transport

Mitosis

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