So this will be the first method that I have personally have thought of by myself. The technique is very advanced and I don’t know if any surgeon or orthopedic medical profession would ever suggest something but I will make this proposal.
We all know that the long bones in the body stop growing after a certain age. I would assume that 95% of the people who desire to grow taller have already reached the age when the bones have already fused and the epiphyseal plates are ossified. I mean, why would we have such a deep desire and almost desperation to become taller if we were still in the process of growing? (Right?) There is a very well known saying that people don’t often appreciate what they have until they lose it.
If we study the biggest long bones in the human body like the femur, humerus,tibia, fibula, , radis, ulna, we should try to find exactly where the epiphyseal line is located which is where the growth plates actually sealed at.
I wanted to only focus on two sets of bones in this post, the femur and the humerus. The femur is the bone that forms the infrastructure of our upper leg. The humerus represents the core of our upper arms.
If we look at the diagram of the femur above, we notice that the epiphyseal plates are not at the same distance as where the core of the bones is, which is the marrow cavity. This means that it is possible then to surgically open the long bone, cut at exactly where the fused plate is, and add a thick slab of cartilage between the surgically separated parts. As we all know, the bone can heal itself, so if we can compress the cartilage between two bones, eventually the 3 parts should fuse together. After the parts are fused and before the body begins to ossify the cartilage again , we can inject a high level of HGH into the body and give it the needed growth hormone to allow for increased bone lengthening.
Since there are a pair of femur and another pair of humerus making up 4 long bones, theoretically there could be 8 places (because there are 2 epiphyseal lines on each end of each long bone) that we can add regrown cartilage into.
Right now, this theory I proposed is probably impossible to actually test because of the amount of surgical work that must go into it. A person would have to be willing to become a quadraplegic at least temporarily just to even test this theory. Their limbs are literally removed and reattached. More than that, before the surgeon can even reach bone, they would have to somehow also cut through the muscle which is ridiculous to imagine. I have never seen amputation done and I would assume that after amputation, there may be no way to reattach or connect the cut muscle to heal/ fuse together, let alone the bone.
Another big concern is where would we even get the right type of cartilage for the patients. It is well known by medical professionals that our body will reject body parts if they don’t agree with our immune system. That is why when a person gets into an accident and are escorted to the hospital or emergency room, their blood type is immediately found so that a person with the correct blood type can give them blood. This is also true for body organs, bone marrow, and other body parts. Historical, the medical literature has shown that cartilage unlike other body parts is not able to regenerate or grow. That has only recently been proven not to be true. Any cartilage that are grown in the laboratory with the most modern technology is intended to be implanted into the knee or hip for people of old age who suffer from osteoporosis and have lost of the cartilage in their joints.
So in conclusion, this theory of mine could theoretically be a viable option, but there are some giant hurdles to get past. They are
1. Finding willing participants and patients who will go through with the experimentation.
2. Learning how to cut through the muscle and then reconnecting the muscles after
3. Figuring out how to connect the cartilage and separated bone to fuse together.
4. Regrowing enough Cartilage for Implantation
5. Having the right type of cartilage for the individual being operated on.
6. Making sure that adding HGH will be effective in getting the cartilage to work like a growth plate.