Something that I have been thinking about recently is the idea of maybe doing something to the bones that make up the overal human height that does not involve the usual long bones, the femur and tibia.

Can we do something to the vertebrate and the intervertebral discs which would be able to make the torso longer? What about the skull?

One irregular bone which we have not really looked at has been the back, heel bone in the human feet which makes the very bottom of the human body. This is the calcaneus.

In terms of bone deformation, the Calcaneus would probably be a very hard, touch bone to remodel, if we can do it at all. This one bone is supposed to be able to supposed 100-200 lbs of human flesh on top of it for around 75-80 years which is the average life expectancy of humans today.

Since humans still are walking at lot, the bottom end of the calcaneus is being hit over and over again everyday. It has around 200 lbs of flesh pushing it against the hard surface ground. If we are to apply the old remodeling principle of Wolff’s Law, the bottom end of the calcaneus would get thicker over time. But it doesn’t, or at least not a level which we can notice a big measurable difference.

So I am proposing the idea that maybe we should try to get a clamp and place a lateral load on both sides of the calcaneus of the heel area to see whether it would cause the bone on the side to remodel, and as a result also remodel the bottom of the calcaneus to gain a few millimeters of bone thickening.

The concept of LSJL is to use clamps to laterally load the bulging epiphysis in the synovial joints of our limbs. If there are mesenchyme that will differentiate into chondrocytes and be able to push the long bone’s hard cortical bone in such a way to stimulate longitudinal growth, would the same work for an irregular bone? I note that most bones have cavities at the center similar to the intermedullary cavity of the tibia and femur. In this cavity is the marrow or intercellular fluid which would have some progenitor mesenchyme which comprise of the red stem cells and the yellow adiposed-derived mesenchymal pluripotent stem cells.

If there is enough progenitor cells in the cavity filled matrix in the hard, strong calcaneus, putting intermittent, strong lateral loads on the calceneus might result in a similar effect to the LSJL basic principles. Will it however produce the same types of growth factors to simulate chondrogenesis and then proliferation? I am not sure.