1. Mediaite
  2. Gossip Cop
  3. Geekosystem
  4. Styleite
  5. SportsGrid
  6. The Mary Sue
  7. The Jane Dough
  8. The Braiser
For Science!

Man To Grow New Fingertip After Having Injured Finger Sewn To Stomach

by Eric Limer | 12:05 pm, November 17th, 2011

Chinese furniture worker Wang Yongjun had the misfortune of cutting off the tip of his middle finger after a less than pleasant encounter with an electric saw. Naturally, he was immediately rushed to the hospital where doctors surveyed the damage and tried to figure out what they could do to save the digit. The finger was pretty mangled. All the muscle and skin were completely gone from the tip; only the bone was showing. In a bid to save what was left of the finger, Doctor Huang Xuesong came up with a novel solution. In his words: “We had to make a quick decision or he could have lost his finger. We decided to cultivate a new fingertip on his stomach.”

The idea, apparently, was to try to restore blood flow to the damaged area so that the finger might be able to heal itself, at least in some respect. The hope is that skin and muscle will grow around the finger tip area. Granted, it wouldn’t be a fingertip in the conventional sense, but it’d probably be preferable to losing the entire finger. The surgery is said to have been a complete success, and Wang can look forward to having his new abomination of a fingertip surgically removed from his stomach in around a month.

My question, after looking at that picture for a while, is where did about half of that finger-to-stomach tissue come from?

The bit circled in red is clearly where the finger has been stitched to the, well, the um…what is that thing? It seems as if he just has a naturally occurring thumb-esque mass already protruding from his stomach. You can see where the finger and the “thing” were stitched together, but there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of surgery around the base of that thing circled in yellow. I mean, this idea of this surgery was to promote tissue growth, but that can’t be the tissue growth we’re talking about, right? What is that thing? It’s way more than a fingertip.

Whatever the case, hopefully Wang’s new finger-let will be enough to get him by in his day-to-day life. Until it gets surgically removed though, I sure hope he doesn’t reflexively try and move that hand too far from his stomach. It could get ugly.

(via Orange News)

Relevant to your interests

  • Liz

    not so novel, i think; similar operations weredone already in WWI.

  • Alan

    Well they can’t just sow the finger directly onto the stomach, then they would healbong together, what probably happened here was the doctor cut a finger sized portion of the stomach to sow the finger to, this is the yellow part you see

  • Anonymous

    Fingertips just grow back as long as the amputation is above the first knuckle. It’s our last bit of regeneration.

  • http://Geekosystem.com Eric Limer

    Yeah, I think you may be right. The way the photo is set up just makes it look like he just had a tubular protrusion conveniently popping out of his stomach.

    “Oh, yeah, let’s just sew it to his stomach-finger. That was easy.”

  • Ralphmaccio

    No they don’t.

  • Velexia Ombra

    Well, they do, but usually only while you are still very young.

  • will3032840

    Yes they do. Troll.

  • Anonymous

    No, they don’t. There have been cases where ECM has been used to “regrow” small portions of skin and cartilage-like tissue on fingertips where a small portion above the bottom of the nailbed has been severed, but even then, the tip never returns exactly to how it was. In many people it may seem that tissue “grows back” due to scar tissue at the end of digits, especially if nail formation is unaffected. So there.

    Source: I’m a tissue engineering grad student


Abrams Media Network click here for advertising opportunities

© 2012 Geekosystem, LLC | About Us | Advertise | Newsletter | Jobs | Privacy | User Agreement | Disclaimer | Power Grid FAQ | Contact | Archives | RSS RSS
Dan Abrams, Founder | Power Grid by Sound Strategies | Hosting by Datagram