The Silver Wand 171
bacterial cultures were sterile—all five kinds had been killed. The soft
healing tissue, called granulation tissue, was spreading out and covering
the bone. In two weeks, the whole base of the wound, which had been
over eight square inches of raw bone, was covered with this friendly pink
carpet. The skin was beginning to grow in, too, so we could forget
about the grafts we thought we'd need to do.
I decided to take an X ray to see how much bone he'd lost. I could
hardly believe the picture. There was clearly some bone growth! We'd
been working through a hole in the cast, so I had no idea if the fracture
was still loose. Without telling John why—I didn't want to get his
hopes up if I was wrong—I removed the cast, felt the leg, and found
that the pieces were all stuck together. John watched, and when I was
done he lifted his leg into the air triumphantly. It held straight against
gravity. His grin opened broader than an eight-lane highway. "I
thought you said the bone wouldn't heal yet, Doc!"
I'd never so much enjoyed being wrong, but I warned John not to get
too excited until we were sure the good news would hold up. I put him
back into a cast and continued treatment another month, until the skin
healed over. By then the X rays showed enough repair to warrant a
walking cast. John left the hospital on crutches and promised not to run
around in the swamps until I told him it was all right. He didn't come
back until two months later. The cast was in tatters, and he walked in
without crutches, smiling at everyone. The last X rays confirmed it:
Healing was nearly complete, and John went back to the wilds.
By mid-1978 we'd successfully treated fourteen osteomyelitis patients
with the positive silver mesh wire. The funny thing was, in five of them
we'd healed nonunions as a "side effect," without any negative current at
all. Obviously it was time to revise our idea that negative electricity
alone fostered growth and positive inhibited it.
Andy Marino, Joe Spadaro, and I talked it over. Reducing the DC
stimulation technique to its essentials, all you needed was an electrode
that wouldn't react with tissue fluid when it wasn't passing current.
Since a negative electrode didn't give off ions, any inert metal, such as
stainless steel, platinum, or titanium, would work with that polarity.
But we knew from our lab work that the situation was very different at
the positive pole, where the current drove charged atoms of the metal
into the nearby environment. We decided it must be chemical, not elec-
trical, processes that were preventing the bacterial growth at the positive
electrode. In that case, maybe polarity was unimportant in growth
enhancement. We postulated that, because silver ions were nontoxic to
human cells and the electrical aspect was right, we inadvertently grew