So I’m still rather interested in the idea of being able to attach/hold/position doodads and tech or tools on the outside of skin using magnets
Cell death from pinch is a problem
Could you attach/pinch stuff with a certain regularity or build up to develop a callus above/around the magnet, letting you leave something adhered via magnet?
I don’t understand the biology of calluses I admit, just spitballing
I think the real problem is the magnet on the inside of your skin.
If you look at magnetic attachments for cochlear implants, the magnetic abutment is attached to the bone on the inside, and the device has a wide base to spread the load over a wide skin area on the outside. So no problem there. But if you have a magnetic subdermal implant, even if you spread the load on the outside of the skin, the teeny tiny magnet on the other side will create a single point of pressure. And there’s no skin calluses on the inside of the skin neither.
I guess the only alternative would be to implant a very wide, weak magnet subdermally. But there is no such thing, and it would be a rather major implant job.
But wouldn’t applying pressure often enough (just not too long each time) develop callus reaction?
Similar to guitar playing
as far as the there’s no callus inside,
With as thin of a section of skin we are talking is there a difference between inside and out?
Yeah there is a significant difference. Callouses only form on your outermost layers of skin (epidermis) because the tissue is barely alive. It’s mostly leftovers that our body doesn’t manage well because it’s being discarded, so abrasions and injuries have time to accumulate callouses. The underside of your skin (hypodermis) is rich with blood vessels and has vital structures that require constant maintenance, so it would never be allowed to form dysfunctional calloused tissue (in that case it would be called cysts)
The outermost layers of skin rely on very thin capillaries to receive blood flow. Those capillaries are supplied by the larger blood vessels in the hypodermis. If we implant a large magnet in the fascia (connective tissue between the skin and muscles) and then use another magnet to pull it outwards, it would still apply pressure on those blood vessels and restrict the oxygen supply. Even if you could promote the growth of a benign cyst in the area, it would still be crushing those blood vessels, just more lightly over a larger area. It doesn’t take much force in the wrong place to really screw things up in your body, though.
Sigh…
So your saying i should really look into getting some magnets attached to my arm bones
…no idea how lol…
And then I could 3d print some cradle arms
Actually that would be ideal.
I’ve approached surgeons with that idea too. Like I said in the past, none of them would touch that with a ten foot pole. But I did find one surgeon in Russia who will do it - and a whole bunch of other wacky ideas I’ve asked her also, which is not reassuring at all. Still, if I feel slightly suicidal, that’s an option.
The only other alternative for a true osseointegrated attachment that’s accessible to lay persons like us is dental implants. I seem to remember that Amal has one and had the idea of attaching a magnet to it, for sound conduction purposes. Not sure whether he got anywhere with that.
Me, I have this idea of going to a dentist to ask them if it’s possible to get an implant in an “impossible” location, at the back of one of the last molars. I have a full set of teeth, and I don’t really want to pull one out to make space for something artificial just for the sake of playing around with implants. I’ve yet to do that though. Knowing how Finnish doctors react to requests for unnecessary things, I’m not in a hurry.
I can see how that would be tough, even more so if you still have your wisdom teeth.
I don’t. I only ever had one wisdom tooth, and it grew so crooked I had it taken out because it was a PITA to brush clean.
I don’t know that it would be tough: by the feel of it, there seems to be space for at least 1 extra tooth past each molar. Probably the empty space for the wisdom teeth I never had, and the one I had taken out. So I suppose I would be asking the dentist to install an implant in a space that was meant to hold a tooth anyway.