Print your own body parts

For people who are missing limbs, 3D printing can make new prosthetics – faster, cheaper and better. It could transform mobility for millions around the world, reports Ian Birrell.

John Nhial was barely a teenager when he was grabbed by a Sudanese guerrilla army and forced to become a child soldier. He was made to endure weeks of walking with so little food and water that some of his fellow captives died. Four more were killed one night in a wild-animal attack. Then the boys were given military training that involved “running up to ten kilometres in the heat and hiding” before being given guns and sent to fight “the Arabs”.

He spent four years fighting, bombed from the skies and blasting away on guns almost too heavy to hold against an enemy sometimes less than a kilometre away. “I think, ‘If I killed that one it’s a human being like me,’ but you are forced,” he said. One day the inevitable happened: Nhial (not his real name) was injured, treading on a mine while on early-morning patrol with two other soldiers in a patch of Upper Nile state surrounded by their enemies.

“I stepped on it and it exploded,” he recalled. “It threw me up and down again – and then I was looking around for my foot. I tried to look for my leg and found that there was no foot. When I saw there’s no foot I feel shock. I was really confused. If I was not with the two others I would kill myself because I thought there was no use for me now, so I decide to die.”

His comrades carried him back to base camp, but there was hardly any medical care there. It took 25 days before he received proper treatment, during which time he developed tetanus on one side of his body. Finally Nhial was put on a flight to the Kenyan border, his life saved when he was handed over to a Red Cross health team. Now, a decade later, he lives in a Juba refugee camp, having suffered further troubles in the whirlwind of conflict that has engulfed the struggling new nation of South Sudan.

During one outbreak of violence he was rounded up with other Nuer – the country’s second-largest ethnic group – and taken to an army barracks. His life was only spared when he was dismissed as “useless” because of his disability. Today he plays wheelchair basketball for his country, although he relies on a prosthetic lower leg to struggle his way round the muddy, sprawling camp that entails long walks to reach the most basic services. It can be difficult to get to training. But at least his hands are free to carry things such as food and water, unlike those on crutches.

Mary Lam (not her real name), 34, who caught polio as a child and today works as a restaurant supervisor in the capital, Juba, explained what it was like growing up reliant on bamboo sticks to haul herself around with a bad leg. She would get up much earlier than her siblings, since it took an hour to get to the classroom and they could rush there much quicker. “It was hard to go with my exercise book to school unless I tie it on my back like a baby,” she said. And it limited her use of her arms too. “When two hands are using the bamboos you are not able to do domestic work in the house.”

Reference:

Enabling the Future, an online community using open source files to make 3D-printed hands and arms.
Exceed is a British charity set up to help landmine survivors, working in five Asian countries. It has begun a seven-month trial of 3D-printed devices in Cambodia with Nia Technologies, an innovative Canadian not-for-profit organisation.

Category:	Science

Attribution

The source of this flipbook:
Ian Birrell. (2017, February 19). Print your own body parts. Mosaic Science. https://mosaicscience.com/story/prosthetics-amputee-3D-printing/
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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For people who are missing limbs, 3D printing can make new prosthetics – faster, cheaper and better. It could transform mobility for millions around the world, reports Ian Birrell.

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