If accelerated natural healing were to occur, what would happen to the human body?

Question

The Details:
The human body is capable of impressive acts of self-repair, but such processes take a lot of time, and can take a toll on the body. Infection or other complications can also develop, and sometimes a wound/inflammation may not heal entirely or correctly without external help. We see such things done in fiction, but it always seems to just work, without any adverse effects or real costs.

The Question:
Let's assume that "external help," whatever it is, is capable of increasing the healing rate of the body to incredible levels. (See: Wolverine) Acting under the assumption that this "external help" merely speeds the process of the body's own natural healing ability without necessarily adding any great amounts of energy or any material, what biological effects would a human being experience during the process, and immediately after it was complete? Would they suffer from a lack of proteins due to cells being rapidly multiplied, or a lack of other material used in the body? Would they feel tired due to their system's exertion of compressing weeks/months of healing into a fraction of that time?

As a baseline, let's take a simple abrasion that wouldn't cause any great deal of alarm if it were to happen to you right now. Worst case, it becomes mildly infected. Your body will fight off the infection and, with time, heal the wound. You are now fine, and can continue on with your life. Until...

Suddenly, you suffer another near-identical abrasion that suffers from a similar infection (let's say immediately, because you are an excellent lab experiment terribly unlucky.) I now invoke my otherworldly healing powers and, within seconds to minutes, you're all fixed up. What happens to you in that time?

My thoughts:

• The healing process takes energy, generates heat, etc. You will feel quite tired, perhaps warm in the afflicted area, and really want a snack. How this would affect your blood cells (platelets, leukocytes, others) I do not know.
• Scarring will still occur as it is a natural part of the healing process, but it may be reduced, a near perfect example of healing.
• If a bone is broken, it can be repaired, but will need to be set just as a normal bone would have to be. If a finger was cut off, it wouldn't regrow unless that was a naturally occurring process.
• Dependent on HOW the healing helps, it could simply cause the damaged cells to repair and multiply, completely ignoring the normal healing process, but still meeting the end goals, and prevent any possibility of scarring. This is, of course, not the question but would make for an interesting comparison.
• Someone will make a joke about their superhuman healing ability, because I targeted "you" in the question.
• Dammit Jim, I'm an electronics guy, not a doctor!

Answer 1

To start, lets do a rough estimate of how much the healing rate has been sped up.

Lets assume a week to heal the original abrasion/infection fully - 7 * 24 * 60 is 10,080 minutes. Conveniently, that means we can say the new abrasion/infection heals in (very slightly over) a minute, for a nice round 10,000x acceleration.

So what does that mean in practical terms?

We'll start with the naive approximation - assume that the magic does healing and nothing else. (And we'll conduct the experiment on a third-party, because my contract says I'm exempt from experiments on dangerous, untested magical technologies ;) )

You noted that the magic isn't providing any significant amount of energy, so the body has to do that itself. An infection like this is often slightly inflamed under normal healing, so lets assume that the body would be at least doubling or tripling the normal blood flow in order to provide the energy and material for the healing process (I.E. an extra 1-2x normal usage). That means we need somewhere between 10,000x and 20,000x the normal allocation to supply our accelerated healing.

This is the point at which warning bells should start going off.

As soon as the healing process kicks in, the tissue immediately surrounding the wound will be drained of any and all resources near-instantly. Blood vessels will dilate and blood flow will increase, but there's absolutely no way that we're going to get a 10,000x increase in blood flow. The wound and surrounding area are going to be oxygen-starved until the healing process is complete, and probably looks like a really swollen, dark-blue bruise right now.

That lack of oxygen wouldn't be a problem if the healing really was going to be over in a minute... but it isn't. The healing can't be done until the required resources arrive, and they're not arriving at anything near 10,000 time normal speed. So we've got an area of oxygen-starved tissue that we expect to stay oxygen-starved for some time. I can't find any solid references for how long it takes for cell death due to anoxia to kick in, but it seems to be somewhere between 10 minutes and a couple of hours. Unfortunately for our patient, those are being quoted for oxygen starvation due to a tourniquet, and that's going to be low oxygen; not the magically-enforced, 99.999% effective, no oxygen environment we have here, so we'll assume the low end of that range.

Fifteen minutes later, therefore, we have cells dying from lack of oxygen and energy, and that means the beginnings of gangrene... which is going to really get the magic going. At this point, we're shifting from using all of the available resources locally to using up a significant fraction of the body's total available resources. The patient's heart rate will skyrocket and he'll be gasping like he just ran a marathon, but unfortunately for him his heart and lungs are no more capable of scaling up 10,000x than his blood vessels were. We're firmly in the grip of runaway positive feedback here - any attempt at healing causes extra damage, which requires more healing, which causes extra damage...

I won't attempt to calculate how long it would take, or what the exact cause of death would be, but it's clear where this process ends. Something is going to fail, fatally, and our patient is going to wish he'd never seen that ad for clinical trial volunteers.

Wait, that's not actually healing at all!

All the above really demonstrates is that we have some Required Secondary Powers in order to get this to work correctly. One of them actually comes built-in - blood cells aren't going to be a problem, because the same processes that are accelerating cell division for healing can be easily turned to producing as many of them as we need.

A second requirement is a significant increase in the efficacy of the circulatory system in order to transport oxygen and other supplies fast enough to keep everything running smoothly. My preference here would be a combination of magical enhancement to let the blood carry far more oxygen/sugar/etc per unit volume, and an increase in blood circulation speed to help with moving enough platelets/white blood cells/etc to the injury site. (A neat little side-effect of this and the fast-repair is that the subject becomes almost entirely immune to fatigue. He'd be able to run a marathon at either 100m-sprint pace, if his lungs were enhanced, or more like 800m/1500m pace if they weren't. Same with weight-lifting, carrying heavy packs, etc - he just doesn't get tired. Ever.)

If you want actual Wolverine-style healing-in-combat, then you'll also need magical breathing- and digestion-enhancement, since that's going to need huge amounts of oxygen and stored sugars/proteins/etc for rebuilding tissue on the fly. (And the subject is going to need to eat a lot more than usual whenever there is healing going on - whether that's during the process or just afterwards to recover depends on exactly how much they're able to store.)

On the other hand, if magical stabilization and a quicker-than-normal recovery is enough, then the magic just needs to be smart about using the resources that are available - with supernatural assistance, even sealing off a major artery shouldn't be too difficult. This does mean that your super-healer can be killed far more easily, though - just stab him in the heart once a minute until he runs out of reserves.

Another thing to think about is positioning - the way an injury (naturally) heals if any cuts are stitched and bones are set is drastically different from what happens if everything is just left twisted and gaping. A pure speed-increase won't change that, nor will it decrease scarring (other than making it fade faster). On the other hand, if the magic somehow knows how everything 'should' be arranged - that is, it can work on the injury as a whole, instead of just operating at a cellular level and ignoring the big picture - then it's perfectly plausible that it would provide perfect healing. (If it doesn't account for the big picture, then a serious injury could 'heal' in a way that would cripple the patient - and the speed would mean that any bone-setting and wound-stitching would need to be done very fast)

Two potential side effects to think about are cancer and accelerated aging. Cancer is essentially cell-division-in-permanent-overdrive, which is not far off from what we have here. If the magic's control of the process is anything less than perfect, you're looking at a major cancer risk (which might be partially/fully countered by the healing, of course). Secondly, one of the major components of aging is telomere shortening, which is linked to cell replication. If you increase the average rate at which your cells replicate by a factor of ten, then you're also increasing the rate at which you age by a factor of ten.

Answer 2

Still TL;DR

It's not possible because biological functions are so inextricably interrelated that speeding up JUST ONE process (wound healing) requires speeding up everything, and that leads to a ton of problems.

TL;DR INTRO *

It boils down to the fact that you need to account for these factors:

• The wound-healing itself – What is the basic process, how does it differ based on a multitude of factors, and why does it happen at the rate it happens rather than super-fast? Can we imitate the fetal wound-healing process in adults, so that it’s faster and doesn’t leave a scar?
• The way that cells divide – Wound healing is basically the process of repairing existing tissue, making new tissue, or both. The repair of tissue and the generation of tissue both require the body to produce a bunch of new cells. How does the rapid proliferation of cells needed to heal wounds happen? What kinds of aspects of cell division and DNA replication change when the proliferation happens faster than normal? Is there a mechanical or biological limit to how fast this can occur?
• The stem cell → specialized cell process – what causes cells to differentiate in a particular way? How do different types specialize at different rates? If everything is sped up, can they retain their functional interactions with one another at every stage of development?
• The ways and rates of cell interaction –cells interact in specific ways, and so the questions become how do they change during rapid wound healing? How can we possibly account for the sheer number of interactions? To give some perspective on that massive (effectively infinity) number of cell interactions, take a look at the signaling pathways for PI3K/Akt signaling (from cellsignal dot com)... There are all those interactions (and that isn’t even all of them) for one specific kinase, Akt, with one specific activator, PI3K. Now consider there are 500 kinases and 50 kinase receptors in a human. That’s 25000 of those maps in the link, just looking at kinase/kinase receptor interaction, which is a type of stimulus/receptor reaction, where there are trillions of types of stimuli and thousands of receptors.
• Assembly – What’s the physical assembly process for cells → tissues → organs → organ systems → organisms? Will there be enough volume to accommodate and structural mechanisms to support new tissue if it is generated much faster than normal?
• Transfer rates – Biotransport is an entire course, but it basically boils down to how heat (external, homeostatic, activity-resultant), mass (tissues, cells, nutrients, waste), fluid (blood, interstitial fluid, water, waste fluid, lymph), and energy (external, metabolic(chemical), byproduct) flows and rates work in the body. What happens to these rates when we change the time constants?
• The diverse nature of tissues - What part of the body is being rapidly healed, and what types of tissues does it contain? What are their differences? How do they interact with one another, and how is this changed by speeding up everything?

ANSWER

As you can hopefully tell from the intro, everything changes when you speed up wound-healing. To answer your initial question, there are LOTS of costs and effects. To explain, here’s a mathematical analogy. All time-rates are dx/dt, the derivative of whatever your'e measuring x, with respect to time, ie. Change in x over change in time (for a specific differential element that is representative of the whole, or is later integrated over the range of the whole {just ignore what is in the parenthesis if it confuses you}). Say dt changes, i.e. The same amount of change in x occurs, but over a different amount of time t. If you want to keep the same value for dx/dt, then you have to change dx by a specific amount. This is easily visualized if you think about the derivative dx/dt as just a fraction.

So, applying the nature of time derivatives to your question, we assign x(t) as the amount of any quantifiable biological entity, as a function of t, time. Then dx/dt is the time derivative of whatever that x is, or, the rate that x changes with time. So now let’s define x as any process or substance required for wound healing to happen at its normal rate. That means dx/dt is the rate of any process x that corresponds to wounds healing normally. Whatever the value of dx/dt is, it’s that way for a reason. All the functions I listed above, during the intro, have specific dx/dt’s because that is what is efficient for human anatomy & physiology. Now, to get wolverine-speed healing, we’re essentially trying to decrease dt, so that it takes less time for x to occur. But if you change dt without changing dx (which isn’t really physically possible), then dx/dt HAS to change, and thus, you really cant maintain healthy physiological rates in the body unless you change EVERY x, and there are, as discussed before, effectively an infinite amount of x’s → infinite amount of things to account for if you want the body to accommodate rapid wound healing.

So what you're asking in terms of what are the consequences can be re-worded, in the context of our analogy → what are the consequences of changing dt without changing dx, and thus causing dx/dt to deviate from a healthy value? To address your particular speculations:

EXPERIENCE DURING THE PROCESS - Pain, lots of pain. Your body isn’t equipped to handle the amount of nutrients in and wastes out that’s needed to accommodate the processes of wound healing when it’s happening faster than healthy. Therefore, the inevitable guest is pain, and it comes from three different paths:

1. You don’t have enough physical space in your body to account for the increased x, whatever x is, that’s needed to regenerate tissues (recall that’s what wound healing is)… So all your organs would need to be bigger, but, unless the magical power of speed healing also makes you huge, you’re NOT bigger. That means all your organs are pushing up against each other. People with nerve degeneration who experience their bones rubbing against one another cite it as the most excruciating pain they’ve ever felt. So yeah, have fun when not only your bones, but also your INTERNAL ORGANS are all pushin up on each other like 6th graders at their first boy/girl dance. But at least your papercut healed in 5 minutes, right?!
2. Really fast rates of waste production that demand routes of exit. More cells means more waste products, and when your body isn’t equipped to get rid of them, you’re not gonna have a good time. By condensing a year’s worth of healing into a few minutes, you’re generating a year’s worth of waste in a few minutes. Even if that process was just happening on the organ level, it wouldn’t be too fun, because that means you’d be pooping out a year’s worth of poop in a minute. But, recall that the body exists as an assembly of cells → tissues → organs → systems → human. . . If organ waste increase is that terrible, then cell waste increase wouldn’t be painful I guess, because it’s probably just impossible.
3. Similarly, super fast healing rates that produce waste fast also require fuel fast. See the fatigue section for this answer.

POST PROCESS EXPERIENCE - The process above isn’t something your'e going to survive, so I guess your post-process experience depends on your opinions with regards to the afterlife.

MATERIAL SHORTAGE /METABOLISM FAILURE → FATIGUE
I’m combining your two speculations because one leads to the other. The short answer is just yes. Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. We talked before about how there’s both more waste produced and more resources required when you speed up wound healing. There’s a whole branch of research, biotransport, dedicated to studying these rates, and it’s more complicated than you could ever imagine. Take a look at this model of oxygen flow through cardiac cells if you don’t believe me: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02460984#page-1. So basically when you increase the rate of wound healing, every rate that mentions time in that article (basically all of them) diverges catastrophically from normal physiological values… and your metabolism fails, meaning your body fails. So let’s look at that in the context of energy production. The process of cellular respiration oxidizes the molecules – mainly glucose – in the food you eat and combines it with oxygen, causing a reaction that produces water and $\text{CO}_2$, and, in the process, releases ATP, adenosine triphosphate, which is where your energy comes from. This is stated: $\text{C}_6\text{H}_{12}\text{O}_2 + 6 \text{O}_2 → \text{ATP} + 12 \text{H}_2\text{O} + 6\text{CO}_2$. If you regenerate tissue too fast (ie. Your wounds heal too fast), then there are more cells, so more cellular respiration is required. However, assuming there’s the same rate in of $\text{O}_2$ and $\text{C}_6\text{H}_{12}\text{O}_2$, you aren’t able to produce as much ATP. You can quantify and validate my statement by the method of limiting reagants from a basic chem. Course. So it’s pretty clear that the amount of $\text{O}_2$ on earth isn’t going to magically increase, and I am assuming the superpower doesn’t include a process that increases the capacity of your bronchioles or decreases your required $\text{O}_2$ saturation, so the $\text{O}_2$ isn’t changing. And, even if you eat more food, there’s a limit to how much glucose ($\text{C}_6\text{H}_{12}\text{O}_2$) your body can actually harvest from it, so you aren’t going to be able to increase the amount of glucose in either. Hence, your body wont be able to produce enough energy (ATP) to make all the new cells function correctly → you’re going to be very, very tired.

To bring up additional concerns:

• Nerve damage for severe wounds – Does the wound healing power also regenerate nerves? If the wound goes deep enough, this will be a major concern that’ll lead to damage beyond the mere physical wound itself.
• Cell repair vs. division – So it isn’t enough to just divide cells, because, in certain epigenetic instances, a damaged cell will divide to produce more cells that are just as damaged. In this case, it might be better to not have more cells than it is to produce more cells with the same problem. In order to really heal wounds, cells have to repair before dividing.
• Ethical concerns – because ethics.

And for your abrasion example, what happens is that you die. But your corpse is abrasionless, so yay! So basically, there’s a reason that wound healing happens in humans at the rate it does, and it’s not feasible to speed it up much (unless we can somehow biomimic fetal wound healing). If it is possible, then there are A LOT of considerations to be made about A LOT of different factors. In conclusion, that’s not a very useful superpower and will probably kill everyone you use it on.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES - Wikipedia pages for basically everything I mentioned - Human Anatomy & Physiology by Dee Ungalaub or something like that; too lazy to look it up - MBOC at molbiolcell.org - Principles of Tissue Engineering by Robert Lanza - Wound Healing/Tissue Types book at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3938/

• I wrote a ~14 pg. intro that goes into cell bio, regenerative medicine, wound-healing processes, & everything I’ve listed above in much more detail, with several mathematical & computer models. Feel free to email me if you want it, but im omitting it in case I want to turn it into a publication… I didn’t expect to get this hyped/write this much about rapid wound-healing.

Answer 3

Infection or other complications can also develop,

Infections are largely caused by stuff getting into the body. Rapid healing would reduce the window for such things immensely. Also, stuff gets into your body all the time, but your immune system can kill those things quickly and easily. Most plausible super-healing would be able to make boatloads of immune cells as well as regenerative bone/tissue/etc. making infections unlikely (unless the healing magic also proliferated the infection cells too... oops).

sometimes a wound/inflammation may not heal entirely or correctly without external help.

I'd imagine that broken bones would not magically reset themselves, and you would need to be careful about super-healing them lest the bone be disfigured. Though with super healing, it's straightfoward (albeit painful) to re-break the bone and set it properly.

Scarring would probably also be a problem, unless the super healing allowed evolution to just use normal skin cells rather than scar tissue for repair.

Answer 4

There are a lot of great answers here, and the facts stand up. I am a trauma nurse by trade and have some experience with wounds and healing. I find a lot of the answers above are scientifically correct, but give you no practical solution. I want to list one way to justify and use healing in fiction that is more realistic and can work well.

High caloric cost

The scientific basis is that flesh is made primarily of protein and fats, which your body stores as muscle tissue and fat. The person being healed can pay a price in calories equivalent to the injury.

Your big burly character just took a ton of damage, maybe even near death, then he is healed. He looks down to see his clothes are several sizes too big an he looks like he just walked out of a Nazi prison camp. He will then need to address feeding quickly and effectively.

Let's say he broke his arm instead, it's painfully set back into place, then healed. He is famished but otherwise OK. If he gets a cut and is healed quickly, I would not worry about infection except in special circumstances, because the infection had no time to take hold.

A whip lacerates your heroine's back. She is rescued and healed shortly after, no need to worry about infection.

Your hero's best friend Jacob is bitten by a Zombie, your team quickly heals him, but the incredibly virulent Zombie pathogen is fatal if even one viral particle makes it into the body.

Foreign bodies like bullets can be pushed out of the wound by the tissues healing from the inside out, but if you are talking shrapnel or broken glass, those may need to be removed manually prior to healing.

Answer 5

Depending on how the clotting factor works with this, for say, a cut, you could see an increase in infection.

I'll push an example to illustrate. Say you slice through part of your finger. Fingers will almost always give you a good bleed, which isn't a bad thing because it does flush the wound without the immediate danger of bleeding out. You don't rely solely on the bleed to "clean" the wound, you still flush that wound, which is really just done with tapwater (really, just tapwater), or in the ED, sterile saline. Either way, both the purpose and the end result are the same, a good flush and dilution of any contaminants remaining in the wound. Then you stop the bleeding and seal it up with some variation of glue, stitches, steristrips, etc. Immediate closure/clotting of such wounds could be problematic, depending on location, depth, and wound type. Large debris is going to cause irritation (think in terms of that splinter you ignored) And taking a stance of just slapping antibiotics on anything prophylacticly and/or unnecessarily has proven problematic.

Just "healing" what is there "as is" can definitely have a dark side, which would make for better fiction. That's a digression though.

Also, faster clotting beyond the simple wound flushing aspect, problematic. I won't wax poetic on the many uses of blood thinners, and the number of people who take them daily to stay health(ier). This superhealing capability you're after would have to have an internal regulation on clotting factor.

I have this image of my last yardwork injury and a wound super healed around splinters and fir debris. Ouch! Or a bullet in a torso with vasculature healing around both bullet (fragments) and gut spillage, which while it might protect you from bleeding out and/or spilling bits of yourself onto the pavement, could very well result in sepsis due to all the "crap" now trapped in your torso.

Re-knitting tissue fast isn't enough, you'll still need to mechanically clean things.

Answer 6

Another thing to consider can be time compression instead of actual chemical acceleration (which would be bound, no matter what, by physical constraints like the diffusion limitation of catalysis in biochemical reactions).

Time compression on the other hand, can be virtually unlimited, the physical processes carry through normally but time is compressed in a specific 3-dimensional area or "bubble". Drugs (antibiotics, antidotes) would still have to be taken, for the former, possibly in bulk.

Another option is not "healing" in the traditional, repair-the-damaged-cells-fast-sense, but simply replacing the damaged cells with healthy ones. In that case, healing is instantaneous (or very close to it)

Answer 7

You can speed up the heart rate to affect healing....the extra blood flow accelerates natural repair to what would have been a future point. trick is to also flag the immune system which 1900 century scientists perfected only to be silenced by emerging pharmaceutic companies. Basic physiological outcomes.