Dbeauty

Air Fryer Spinach and Feta Meatballs are two great things…. quick AND easy to make! (This is especially true when they’re cooked in the air fryer!) We love having meatballs as a snack or even as a dinner on those days where you just don’t want to spend time cooking and want something tasty to eat. Not to mention, these meatballs are perfect to make for a party, game day, or solo snacking with a glass of wine and Netflix!!

Usually we make meatballs in the oven, which is also a great way to cook them, but in the summer we really don’t like to use the oven that much. Not sure about you but our kitchen heats up like crazy! So, instead of heating up the house with the oven, why not use the air fryer. The meatballs were juicy and had great flavor. In fact, I think they’re even better in the air fryer than the oven. They get a little crispy on the outside. Plus, it takes half the time to cook the meatballs in the air fryer. BONUS!

Spinach and Feta Meatballs

These Spinach and Feta Meatballs take just a few minutes to put together and less than 15 minutes to cook in the air fryer. Cook the Spinach according to the package. Fresh spinach can also be used for this recipe, but it’s faster to use frozen spinach. Plus, you need a ton (well, not a ton, but a lot) of fresh spinach to get 8 ounces of cooked spinach!

Mix together all the ingredients – Ground Turkey, Spinach, Feta, Garlic Powder and Cumin.

Form the meatballs after the ingredients are mixed together completely. Make them about one inch round. NOTE: The Spinach feta meatballs can be smaller. Just adjust the time to cook them. They’ll cook faster if they are smaller. It’s important to know all Air Fryers cook a little differently so it’s important to check them to make sure they are not over/under cooked.

Spray the Air Fryer with cooking spray. Place the meatballs in the air fryer and cook at 400 degrees for 7 minutes. Flip them and cook for an additional 7 minutes until cooked all the way through. The internal temperature of the Spinach Feta Meatballs can be taken with a meat thermometer. I like to cook the turkey meatballs to internal temperature of 170 degrees. The meatballs are done at 165 degrees. We just like them all little crispy.

Serve the Spinach Feta Meatballs with your favorite sauce. We like Tzatziki Sauce. These meatballs are great with the quick cool garlicky sauce!

Quick Tzatziki Sauce

Chop 1 Cucumber

Sprinkle 1/2 tsp of salt on chopped cucumber and stir well.

Squeeze the Cucumber with your hands to remove the excess moisture and drain

Stir in 1 and 1/2 cups of fat free plain Greek yogurt with the cucumbers

Add the juice of half a lemon (add more to taste)

Stir in 2 cloves of finely chopped garlic

Add 1 TBS olive oil

Stir in 2 Tbs chopped fresh dill (optional)

Salt and Pepper to taste

Stir well

Taste to see if you need additional lemon or salt. Remember, you can always add more seasoning… you can’t take it out!!! It’s better to start with less, taste and add more if needed. This is so good you will want to “taste” it several times!!!

Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Air Fryer Spinach and Feta Meatballs

Air Fryer Spinach and Feta Meatballs are bursting with flavor. The feta and spinach are mixed together with ground turkey and spices then air fried (or baked). These meatballs are perfect for dinner, an appetizer, or quick snack.

Print Pin

Course: Appetizer, Dinner

Cuisine: Mediterranean

Keyword: Air Fryer, Easy, Meatball

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cook Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 35 minutes

Servings: 4 Servings

Calories: 45kcal

Author: Belly Laugh Living

A Few Things We Use

Mixing Bowl

Spoon

Measuring Spoons

Air Fryer

Ingredients

1 Pound Ground Turkey 99% fat free

1 teaspoon Cumin

5 Ounces Feta

8 Ounces Spinach

1/2 teaspoon Salt

1/2 teaspoon Pepper

1 teaspoon Garlic Powder

Instructions

Cook spinach as directed on package. Add salt and pepper. When cooked, drain the spinach.

In a large bowl mix together Ground Turkey, Spinach, Feta, Garlic Powder, and Cumin

Mix together well

Spray the bottom of the air fryer basket with cooking spray

Form the meatballs- about 1 inch round. Will make about 20 meatballs

Place the meatballs in the air fryer and cook at 400 degrees for 7 minutes.

Flip meatballs and cook for an additional 7 minutes at 400 degrees. Make sure they're cooked all the way through

Serve with your favorite dipping sauce. We like to serve ours with Tzatziki Sauce.

Enjoy!!!!

Notes

Quick Tzatziki Sauce

Chop a cucumber

Sprinkle 1/2 tsp of salt on chopped cucumber and stir well.

Squeeze the cucumber with your hands to remove the excess moisture and drain

Stir in 1 and 1/2 cups of fat free plain Greek yogurt with the cucumbers

Add the juice of half a lemon (add more to taste)

Stir in 2 cloves of finely chopped garlic

Add 1 TBS olive oil

Stir in 2 Tbs chopped fresh dill (optional)

Salt and Pepper to taste

Stir well

Taste to see if you need more lemon or salt. Remember, you can always add more seasoning… you can’t take it out!!! So it’s better to start with less, taste and add more if needed.

Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Nutrition

Calories: 45kcal | Carbohydrates: 1g | Protein: 6g | Fat: 2g | Saturated Fat: 1g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 1g | Trans Fat: 1g | Cholesterol: 19mg | Sodium: 193mg | Potassium: 127mg | Fiber: 1g | Sugar: 1g | Vitamin A: 1099IU | Vitamin C: 3mg | Calcium: 51mg | Iron: 1mg

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The post Air Fryer Spinach and Feta Meatballs appeared first on Belly Laugh Living.

Air Fryer Spinach and Feta Meatballs Air Fryer Spinach and Feta Meatballs are bursting with flavor. Feta and spinach are mixed with ground turkey & spices then air fried(or baked)

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, the funding reports are out: Rock Health is saying $14.7 billion for the first half of the year, and Startup Health is saying $20.1 billion. Those numbers are pretty much what the numbers were for ALL of 2020. Now onto some deals: on Episode 221, Jess asks me about Novacardia raising $57 million for its cardiology practice management business. Wellthy raises $25 million, bringing its total up to $50 million – this is a caregiving navigation concierge firm aimed at employers. Osso VR raises $27 million in a Series B, less than a year after closing their A, working on virtual reality for practicing surgery. Finally, Form Health raises $12 million in a Series A for its obesity telehealth platform. —Matthew Holt

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 221 | Funding for Novacardia, Wellthy, Osso VR, and Form Health Today on Health in 2 Point 00, the funding reports are out: Rock Health is saying $14.7 billion for the first half of the year, and Startup Health is saying $20.1 billion. Those numbers are pretty much what the numbers were for ALL of 2020. Now onto some deals: on Episode 221, Jess asks me...

By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH

Privia Health ($PRVA) went public a few weeks ago and the stock not only popped when it hit the market, but has continued to rise. When you look at the numbers – and hear about the business model from CEO Shawn Morris – it’s easy to get excited and see why. Privia calls itself a “physician enablement” business, which is the two-word marketing way of saying that they bring together different docs in a region and give them the systems to become part of a value-based care network while also maintaining their private practices. They’re more or less building accountable care organizations (ACOs) in a hub-and-spoke fashion, uniting docs around Privia’s common tech systems, workflow processes, value-based care strategies, and contracting power with commercial and government payers. The model is appealing to docs who want to make the switch to value-based care, but still want the autonomy of their own practices. The value prop has already attracted more than 2,700 providers in 650 different locations netting the biz $817 million in revenue in 2020 – and Shawn says they’ll only expand from here. What’s the growth plan? Value-based care models are often criticized as “un-scalable” – what does Shawn say to combat that? A great, detailed chat that pitches a hopeful end to fee-for-service healthcare and a promising future for a newly public healthcare co.

Does Newly IPO’d Privia Health’s Climbing Stock Price Prove Value-Based Care Can Scale? By JESSICA DaMASSA, WTF HEALTH Privia Health ($PRVA) went public a few weeks ago and the stock not only popped when it hit the market, but has continued to rise. When you look at the numbers – and hear about the business model from CEO Shawn Morris – it’s easy to get excited and see...

By MATTHEW HOLT & JESS DAMASSA

Policies|Techies|VCs: What’s Next For Health Care? is the conference bringing together the CEOs of the next generation of virtual & real-life care delivery, and all the permutations thereof. Today we add to last week's fantastic list of speakers with another 14 great speakers, including one CEO of a company that has just SPACed onto the public market (Sharecare), and another that is about to (Babylon Health)! You can register here or learn how to sponsor. This week's new additions are:

Ali Parsa

Babylon Health

Julia Hu

Lark

Niko Skievaski

Redox

Rushika Fernandopulle

Iora Health

Andy Coravos

HumanFirst

Iyah Romm

Cityblock

Pauline Lapin

CMMI

Blake McKinney

CirrusMD

Jeff Ruby

Newtopia

Sami Iniken

Virta

Deena Shakir

Lux Capital

Jeff Arnold

Sharecare

Stephanie Tilenius

Vida

CONFERENCE UPDATE–Policies|Techies|VCs: What’s Next For Health Care? By MATTHEW HOLT & JESS DAMASSAPolicies|Techies|VCs: What’s Next For Health Care? is the conference bringing together the CEOs of the next generation of virtual & real-life care delivery, and all the permutations thereof. Today we add to last week's fantastic list of speakers with another 14 great ...

For community cancer centers that rely on patient reimbursement to stay afloat, a smart data-driven approach to clinical trials provides a foundation for future growth.

Brenda Noggy

Dr. Tandy Tipps

By TANDY TIPPS and BRENDA NOGGY

Covid-19’s tragic, devastating impact on cancer treatment is now well documented. Cancer screenings dropped by almost 90 percent at the peak of the pandemic. Billing for some leading cancer medications dropped 30 percent last summer. Studies found a 60 percent decrease in new clinical trials for cancer drugs and biological therapies.

Cancer centers, like every part of the US health system, have a lot of ground to make up. Those community cancer centers without grants and other institutional advancement funds, experience financial and human resources as major constraints to charting a path to growth. For them, successful programs which generate revenues for expansion or break even help them maintain fiscal health. Often, unfortunately, too often their research programs lose money.

Clinical trials have not been a viable revenue source because of the difficulty in accurately predicting patient enrollment and the challenges of managing trial portfolios, a task that requires streamlined feasibility processes that include querying baseline populations for new trials and potentially eligible patients.

The hard work of patient screening and trial matching requires clinical coordinators, physician investigators and research support staff to spend between three to eight manually scouring databases of electronic medical records and unstructured files to find patients eligible for trials based on increasingly complex inclusion and exclusion criteria. This costly process does not take into consideration the pre-screening efforts in patient matching that may not be reimbursable.

Resources are also needed to implement feasibility processes to accurately predict how many patients might enroll in a trial if they are eligible. Most community-based sites do not have an accurate ability to query their current patient populations by disease cohort or mutation in real time. They often rely on physicians’ memories to estimate patient numbers for trial feasibility questionnaires, which must returned to sponsors quickly, usually before cancer centers have definitive recruitment numbers.

As a result, before COVID, an average of only 5 percent of patients had a chance of participating in trials, 50 percent of clinical trials failed to meet enrollment goals and less than 14 percent were completed on time. Cancer centers still incur the administrative and clinical resources required to maintain the protocols in the first place, however.

These false starts impact forecasting for future program budgets. Trial startup costs and per research patient accrual reimbursements are program revenues, after all.

Cancer centers today have a new way to address these challenges, however. They can leverage a new technology – a patient matching tool – to create more efficient and effective screening methods that will save research teams time and effort and help predict future revenue streams.

Including natural language parsers, optical character recognition and machine learning, these AI-related technologies match a proposed trial against cancer center patient populations to determine, with the oversight of center nurses, doctors and staff, whether it might successfully recruit patients quickly and efficiently.

The benefits of this technology to match patients to trials using cancer centers’ preexisting clinically relevant data are clear. Clinical trial patients generate research costs covered by federal grants or industry sponsors.

They also generate downstream revenues related to the standard of care procedures that patients receive regardless of their participation in a trial, usually through private insurance or Medicare.

Cancer centers can designate a dedicated area in the trial infusion unit with phlebotomy and dedicated research infusion nurses, potentially adding income to cover the cost of a service, especially for trials requiring one-to-one clinical nursing support, for instance.

Lastly but certainly not least, the technology can also help oncologists see the gaps in their treatment and find cutting edge trials that will truly help patients, especially the ones without standard of care treatment options, and provide opportunities for publishable research.

At the top administrative levels of hospitals and cancer centers, the upcoming post-Covid reset provides a chance for CFOs to challenge old assumptions about clinical trials, explore the latest patient matching solutions and reconsider the cost-benefit analysis – on both financial and patient outcomes.

At the clinical level, if AI-related technologies can help match real people to the unique needs of trials, doctors, nurses and others can spend more time connecting one-to-one with potential trial participants, reaffirming the human connections that can be drowned out by paperwork and data input.

Lastly, at the public health level, local cancer centers engaging in clinical trials can help address systemic inequities in who gets access to emerging treatments, including the geographic and racial barriers that the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted.

There are many cancer centers that exist today that did not 10 years ago. That has helped the US make major gains in cancer care. During the same period, we have seen revolutionary advances in cancer drugs and therapeutics. But there is a research bottleneck, however.

The research bottleneck is, at its core, a data bottleneck. The widespread adoption of electronic medical records means we have more information about patients than ever, and the depth of this knowledge is increasing with every parallel advance in medical imaging and patient monitoring. Yet substantial portions of data exists as unstructured data.

What clinical providers require now are intuitive tools that can help them instantly extract the data they need, when they need it — replacing the digging through doctor’s notes to figure out whether patients meet criteria for certain treatments or trials. Executives, meanwhile, need the assurance of a stable revenue stream that won’t rise and fall with each study.

Future breakthroughs in cancer treatment will depend not only on R&D spending, but also investments in innovation around recruitment, management and the logistics of trials. Wherever the next great advancement in cancer treatment comes from, it will begin with that first group of patients joining a FIH or Phase 1 trial. That trial will need patients. Their care doesn’t come for free.

Dr. Tandy Tipps is Senior Vice President for Healthcare Solutions at Inteliquet. Brenda Noggy is Executive Director of Cancer Center Development and Deployment at Inteliquet.

thehealthcareblog.com

On Thursday’s Matthew Holt () will be joined by regulars, employer health expert Jennifer Benz (); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (); THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (); privacy expert and now entrepreneur Deven McGraw (); and–we are thrilled to have back–fierce patient activist Casey Quinlan ().

If you’d rather listen than watch, the audio is preserved as a weekly podcast available on our iTunes & Spotify channels

THCB Gang Episode 61 – Thurs July 8 1pm PT – 4pm ET On Thursday’s Matthew Holt () will be joined by regulars, employer health expert Jennifer Benz (); patient safety expert and all around wit Michael Millenson (); THCB regular writer Kim Bellard (); privacy expert and now entrepreneur Deven McGraw ...

By HANS DUVEFELT

The Art of Medicine is Doing the Ordinary Well

Primary care doctors don’t usually operate any sophisticated medical instruments or perform any advanced procedures. But there is still art in what we do. We take care of ordinary ailments in ordinary people and that can be done well or not so well. There is no obvious glamor in it, but when our prescriptions, basic procedures or simple advice help people feel better, we live up to our own and our patients’ hopes and expectations – and some of the time, we even exceed them.

Art is art, regardless of the medium or subject. Weren’t the old Dutch masters’ most appreciated paintings depictions of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances? Not every artist gets to paint the Sistine Chapel.

So many things in our culture are at the two extremes of poorly done and exquisite: fast fashion or haute couture, drive-up burgers or five star restaurants. Fewer things are made with care by craftspeople for individual users. Medicine needs to be more like that in order to bring real healing in many conditions.

In our everyday encounters with our patients, we are often distracted by things other than what they expect or hope to get from us. We have agendas imposed on us for preventive care and public health purposes. It is sometimes hard to do your best if you can’t concentrate on the issue at hand. Art requires focus. It is not a casual endeavor. It requires attention to detail, just as much as a vision of the big idea. It is – or should be – for each of us, in order to do our best, to find the balance between those two aspects of our work.

The Soul of Medicine is Connecting as Humans

We are not technicians. We treat the whole person, because most things in primary care are diseases that affect more than just one organ. We now also, again (historically), accept that diseases of the body may have their root causes in what we call the soul. In order to know and treat another person, we must show our own. Only if we do that will we learn enough to be of any real help to the patient who hopes to trust us enough to take our advice. We must create connection.

The English poet William Blake wrote:

“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the Chief inlet of Soul in this age.”

Thomas Moore, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Care of the Soul (1992), writes in Care of the Soul in Medicine (2010):

“The soul, in contrast [to spirit], is grounded in every day life – home, family, friends, work, food, beauty, nature. Aristotle said that the soul is what makes a thing (or a person) exactly what it is. What makes an axe an axe , he said, is its soul. What makes me what I am essentially, what gives me my deepest identity, is my soul.

You can tell when doctors or nurses do their work with soul. They are present to us as people. They don’t hide behind their professional masks or their routine chores. They give you their attention and relate to you, if only for a short time. Here we come upon another essential sign of soul – connection.”

Connection Evolves During the Course of Doing the Ordinary

It is often during he most ordinary circumstances we make our strongest connections. That is when showing who you are seems most natural, not when the stakes are high. Over the course of several routine visits, we develop a relationship that can make it easier to talk about difficult things later on. We build credibility and trust while we deliver basic care.

As my Swedish colleague Christer Petersson wrote (quoting him again):

“It took about 10 years and quite a bit of agonizing before I discovered that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, and it took another 10 years to understand that I actually was a doctor and didn’t just work as one. During that time I learned that man is more than his digestive system and the most important events in life often happen in the seemingly uninteresting space where blood flows, boils burst and wounds heal.”

I firmly believe that unless you see your work as practicing an art and engaging soulfully with your patients, you are on the path to professional burnout and away from medicine.

Hans Duvefelt is a Swedish-born rural Family Physician in Maine. This post originally appeared on his blog, A Country Doctor Writes, here.

The Art and Soul of Medicine Exist in the Ordinary By HANS DUVEFELT The Art of Medicine is Doing the Ordinary Well Primary care doctors don’t usually operate any sophisticated medical instruments or perform any advanced procedures. But there is still art in what we do. We take care of ordinary ailments in ordinary people and that can be done well ...

This September, Moveit4smiles will be taking on one of the most magnificent mountains in Britain - Bla Bheinn. Bla Bheinn is said to be one of the most spectacular hikes on the Isle of Skye, if not all of Scotland! It will be an 8km (5 mile) walk with an ascent of 990m. This mammoth task will be taken on in the name of Mouth Cancer Action and to raise awareness of the importance of British children having the HPV vaccine. To warm up for the big climb, there will also be a walk around the ruined coastal villages of Boreraig and Suisnish. If you join us on our trek you can expect to enjoy some spectacular views of the Red Hills, Rum and a large part of the mainland North-West Highlands. By taking part you will be helping us to raise awareness and money for Mouth Cancer Action. To book your place for this amazing event, please purchase tickets below. Itinerary for the weekend Saturday 11 September 2021: Boreraig and Suisnish (10 miles / 5-6 hours / ascent 350m) ...

Join us at Bla Bheinn - 11/09/2021 09:00:00 Join Moveit4Smiles as we take on the challenge of Bla Bheinn, Scotland, in September and help raise money for Mouth Cancer Action!

This September, Moveit4smiles will be taking on one of the most magnificent mountains in Britain - Bla Bleinn. Bla Bheinn is said to be one of the most spectacular hikes on the Isle of Skye, if not all of Scotland! It will be an 8km (5 mile) walk with an ascent of 990m. This mammoth task will be taken on in the name of Mouth Cancer Action and to raise awareness of the importance of British children having the HPV vaccine. To warm up for the big climb, there will also be a walk around the ruined coastal villages of Boreraig and Suisnish. If you join us on our trek you can expect to enjoy some spectacular views of the Red Hills, Rum and a large part of the mainland North-West Highlands. By taking part you will be helping us to raise awareness and money for Mouth Cancer Action. To book your place for this amazing event, please purchase tickets below. Itinerary for the weekend Saturday 11 September 2021: Boreraig and Suisnish (10 miles / 5-6 hours / ascent ...

Join us at Bla Bheinn - 11/09/2021 09:00:00 Join Moveit4Smiles as we take on the challenge of Bla Bheinn, Scotland, in September and help raise money for Mouth Cancer Action!

By KIM BELLARD

I learned a new word this week: bioresorbable. It means pretty much what you might infer — materials that can be broken down and absorbed into the body, i.e., biodegradable. It is not, as it turns out, a new concept for health care – physicians have been using bioresorbable stitches and even stents for several years. But there are some new developments that further illustrate the potential of bioresorbable materials.

It’s enough to make Green New Deal supporters smile.

Bioresorbable stents and stitches are all well and good – who wants to be stuck with them or, worse yet, to need them removed? – but they are essentially passive tools. Not so with pacemakers, which have to monitor and respond. Medicine has made great progress in making pacemakers ever smaller and longer lasting, but now we have a bioresorabable pacemaker.

Researchers from Northwestern University and The George Washington University just published their success with “fully implantable and bioresorbable cardiac pacemakers without leads or batteries.” What their title might lack in pithy is more than offset by the scope of what they’ve done. Fully implantable! No leads! No batteries! And bioresorbable!

Most pacemakers are, of course, designed to be permanent, but there are situations where they are implanted on a temporary basis, such as after a heart attack or drug overdose. Dr. Rishi Arora, co-leader of the study, noted: “The current standard of care involves inserting a wire, which stays in place for three to seven days. These have potential to become infected or dislodged.”

Dr. Arora went on to explain:

Instead of using wires that can get infected and dislodged, we can implant this leadless biocompatible pacemaker. The circuitry is implanted directly on the surface of the heart, and we can activate it remotely. Over a period of weeks, this new type of pacemaker ‘dissolves’ or degrades on its own, thereby avoiding the need for physical removal of the pacemaker electrodes. This is potentially a major victory for post-operative patients.

The device is only 15 millimeters long, 250 microns thick and weighs less than a gram, yet still manages to deliver electric pulses to the heart as needed. It is powered and controlled using near field communications (NFC); “You know when you try to charge a phone wirelessly? It’s exactly the same principle,” GW’s Igor Efimov, a co-leader of the study, told StatNews.

It dissolves over a period of days or weeks, based on the specific composition and thickness of the materials.

Watch it dissolve:

The researchers are pretty pumped. Dr. Efimov says:

The transient electronics platform opens an entirely new chapter in medicine and biomedical research. The bioresorbable materials at the foundation of this technology make it possible to create whole host of diagnostic and therapeutic transient devices for monitoring progression of diseases and therapies, delivering electrical, pharmacological, cell therapies, gene reprogramming and more.

They’re not the only ones. Moussa Mansour, director of the Atrial Fibrillation Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the study, told StatNews: “It seems to be a very revolutionary idea. I believe it’s going to be well-received in the field. It targets an unmet need, and I believe it’s going to benefit patients… not only because it targets a temporary patient application, but because of its potential to be expanded to other applications in medicine.”

Northwestern’s John A. Rogers, who led the device development, predicts: “Transient technologies, in general, could someday provide therapy or treatment for a wide variety of medical conditions — serving, in a sense, as an engineering form of medicine.”

Let that sink in: “An engineering form of medicine.”

Then there is a fracture electrostimulation device (FED). Researchers at the University of Wisconsin have developed an implantable, self-powered, bioresorbable device that stimulates bone growth and healing, then dissolves when its job is done. The device gets its power by converting mechanical energy generated by tiny movements into electric power, which then stimulates the bone. In some situations, they admit, “We may need the device to respond to other types of internal mechanical sources, like blood pressure changes.”

As with the pacemaker, the device can be “fine tuned” to last from weeks to months by “tweaking” the make-up of the materials.

Right now, the device has only been tested on rats, but lead researcher Xudong Wang is eager for the next steps: “It will be very interesting and impactful to address the development from animal to human.”

If you think those are cool, then hold still for bioresorbable 3D printed tissue scaffolds. Tissue scaffolds, if you didn’t know (I didn’t) are used in tissue engineering to provide structures for tissue growth/repair/regeneration, such as after breast cancer treatment. The study concludes:

We have demonstrated that it’s possible to produce highly porous scaffolds with shape memory, and our processes and materials will enable production of self-fitting scaffolds that take on soft tissue void geometry in a minimally invasive surgery without deforming or applying pressure to the surrounding tissues. Over time, the scaffold erodes with minimal swelling, allowing slow continuous tissue infiltration without mechanical degradation.

These new scaffolds offer several advantages over current approaches, including better elasticity, more ability to retain “shape memory” after compression, compatibility with tissues, and, of course, being bioresorbable. The researchers describe them as “4D” materials because how the materials change over time is a factor.

The researchers believe: “By focusing on the design of a material with a unique combination of features, we have been able to achieve a minimally invasive 4D structure that could reduce surgical impact while enhancing rates of healing and patient recovery.”

Again, they’re not yet testing on humans, but a separate study – the INSPIRE study – has tested a Neuro-Spinal Scaffold that is made of a bioresorbable polymer on patients with a severe spinal cord injury, demonstrating “that the potential benefits of the NSS outweigh the risks in this patient population and support further clinical investigation in a randomised controlled trial.”

I love the idea of using bioresorbable materials in health care. I love the idea of an engineering form of medicine, just as I love the idea of a biochemical form of medicine. Much of the history of medicine has involved inserting foreign substances/materials into us, with varying degrees of violence and success. Bioresorbable approaches should give us better options.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor.

Make Mine Bioresorbable By KIM BELLARD I learned a new word this week: bioresorbable.  It means pretty much what you might infer -- materials that can be broken down and absorbed into the body, i.e., biodegradable.  It is not, as it turns out, a new concept for health care – physicians have been using bioresorbable sti...