Wound Healing from Bench to Bedside: A PPPM Bridge Between Physical Therapies and Chronic Inflammation

Wound healing (WH) is a complex phenomenon recollecting the ability of the body to preserve homeostasis. Its description ranges from the very minute details on the progression of the molecular and cellular events (bench) occurring locally to a wound, to the very general, and almost colloquial description of how injuries recover more or less quickly and smoothly in an individual or a patient (bed). The connection between the two representations of WH is far from clear and rarely discussed from an overarching and theoretical perspective in biological, computational and medical terms that represent three fundamental components of modern PPPM. Importantly, understanding WH and its eliciting/modulating factors (including physical stimuli) as a continuum between molecular (local) and clinical (systemic) events is of particular relevance for advancing in the management of chronic inflammation, a hallmark of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). The ambition of this chapter is to make the necessity for such continuum explicit. This evidence will be supported with the first integrated overview on the scattered basic knowledge existing about WH's neglected eliciting factors: physical stimuli. Further, an exemplar translational process using rheumatoid arthritis (RA), proceeding from experimental data in animal models to a pilot clinical study, will cover from bench to bedside the relevance of WH as a systemic anti-inflammatory phenomenon, and will be discussed in the frame of PPPM for its therapeutic potential.