The world is full of curiosities. And while some local and global events seem to suggest we're going backward, it's important to remember that progress often takes a winding path, and we can't underestimate how far we've come.
For example, open the wonderful book by Jack Hartnell, called Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, and you will quickly realize how drastically our understanding of the human body and medicine has evolved just over the last few hundred years. Did you know that people would get their blood drawn even as insurance against future illness? Anything from forthcoming menstruation to the onset of a particularly hot summer!
In the meantime, let's check out an online thread where folks have been sharing wild medical facts. While they might keep you up at night, they’re also a testament to how far we've come in understanding and treating the human body.
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A defibrillator actually stops your heart. It’s up to your body to restart things correctly. The equivalent of the IT guy asking if you’ve tried turning it off and on again.
Your stomach gets a new lining every few days to prevent it from digesting itself.
I can't declare a hypothermic person deceased until we warm them to room temperature.
Hot-Data686:
They're not dead until they're warm and dead.
OMG_A_CUPCAKE:
Anna Bågenholm comes to mind. She survived a body temperature of 13.7°C (56.7°F) and made an almost full recovery.
Endometriosis (tissue from the womb) is not cancer. But it can send out cells that spread through your internal organs and grow, stick your guts together or block them, deform your organs and eat holes through them, and spread up to your diaphragm and lungs. Unsurprisingly, this is agonisingly painful.
Something like 1 in 10 women have it. And apparently it's still not worth doing research into.
i_am_voldemort:
My spouse is a gynecologist surgeon. She had a patient with endometriosis in her lungs that caused life-threatening pulmonary issues.
CannibalAnn:
I do medical deep dives regularly as a morbidly curious freak and endometriosis is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. It can grow anywhere. People have had it in their brain and on their skin. And it can go through menses. Awful, scary, terrifying stuff.
And yet women are still told it’s just painful periods and normal….
Pregnancy can just turn on diseases that you may have never had before.
I developed a thyroid disease and an autoimmune disease during my first pregnancy.... it's been great...
Inwint:
It can also make your eyesight worse, cause cavities and loose teeth, cause or exacerbate bone loss/osteoporosis, make moles or angiomas grow or appear, make subsequent periods heavier, temporarily reduce grey matter in the brain, cause pelvic organ prolapse, cause skeletal structure changes, cause abdominal muscle separation, new-onset diabetes (usually from gestational diabetes), and increase the risk of Alzheimer’s.
The number of side effects, complications, and possible permanent effects of pregnancy would fill a book, yet people still try to pretend it’s a perfectly normal and harmless process and women are just complaining.
I’m even happier with my choice not to have children reading this…
It's impressively hard to close someone's eyes after they die.
Not like on TV.
You press them down, and then they open back up a little. Then you have to press them closed again and press a little harder.
I know. I was bedside when my Dad passed away. If he was still in the room, I bet he had a good chuckle.
Miss him.
This is why they used to put coins on the eyes of the deceased. To hold them closed and to hide the fact of they drifted back open.
Pneumothorax (collapsed lung) can just like...happen. if you sneeze or cough or just breathe wrong, your lung can"nope" and collapse.
When you get a kidney transplant they don’t take out your original kidneys, so you have 3 kidneys after a transplant. Also, they transplant the new kidney into your abdomen and it sits on top of your pelvis/hip area. If you get multiple transplants, they just keep adding new kidneys in. I’ve known of patients who’ve had 6 kidneys. I learned a lot about this during my kidney transplant 6 years ago. ♻️.
During the Covid outbreak when the mask vs anti-maskers clashed, a similar situation happened during the Spanish flu outbreak during WWI.
There were as many people in government pushing for masks and vaccines (a Proto version of what we have) as many were against it — it didn’t help that both sides of WWI lied/modified their numbers so that their opponents wouldn’t see as weakness/exploit it; the only country that was open of its numbers was Spain…as it was fighting a civil war.
Due to Spain accurately reporting its numbers - both sides of WWII pinned the blame of the flu on Spain as their numbers were reportedly larger than the other countries (cause war) thus obviously the flu had to have originated from there.
Most don’t know it originated from the United States.
If a man has fallen, and gets a b**er, do not move him. It’s a sign of spinal injury.
gets exactly what, you dumb censorship morrons?! It looks like pretty important fact you hide it away!
The female fetus has developed every egg they will ever ovulate before they are born.
I had a total thyroidectomy last year due to thyroid cancer. I learned that, in rare cases, your body can regrow thyroid tissue (maybe healthy/functioning, maybe not) from the very small number of thyroid cells left behind. It’s the reason thyroid cancer patients need to be on a high dose of replacement hormone to suppress the production of thyroid stimulating hormone that could trigger regrowth. It was wild to learn that removing the gland doesn’t always solve the issue.
Newborn girls can have a period and both newborn boys and girls can lactate.
95% of URIs that kids get are viruses (no antibiotics needed)
You CANNOT get the flu from the flu shot. You can feel a little s****y, but if you have URI symptoms after the flu shot.. you just have a cold.
I once read a story (I don't remember it where it was from, either it was on reddit or here, also I don't remember the whole story) where a mom found a tiny amount of blood in her daughter's diaper (or something related to it) and almost killed her husband in the hospital only aka the daughter's father, thinking he might had done something to her.
Cancer vaccine has been in the works by Moderna and BNT. They have, in fact, been working on them when they took a detour to make COVID vaccines (and made a ton of money). Their results in 2023 were surprisingly good; great hopes for cancer treatment in the near future.
Prion diseases. Basically a protein, which is the basic building block for your body, goes rogue. This leads to a chain reaction where other proteins around it are misshaped and basic body functions break down. When it attacks the brain it causes irreversible brain damage and death. There’s no way to target a rogue protein. In diseases like Mad Cow disease it’s acquired by consuming meat. But it can also just happen randomly.
This is honestly one of the most terrifying rabbitholes you can research imho. Prions cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which is incurable and its only treatment is providing palliative care; on average, people die within 12 months after their formal diagnosis. You know what's even more terrifying, though? Depending on the variant of CJD and route of exposure, incubation periods range from a few months to *decades* to "unknown". As unlikely as it is, it's not impossible to develop vCJD in 2025 because you ate the wrong burger in the 90s.
Situs inversus - a congenital condition in which the major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from their normal positions. which I only learned about when reading about Catherine O’Hara (Home Alone, Schitt’s Creek)- apparently her organs, like heart, lungs etc are flipped to the opposite sides of her body.
shaarlock:
My grandfather had this! Made his doctors very confused when he had appendicitis, and the pain was on the wrong side.
A tumor can contain hair and/or teeth.
coors1977:
I had a cyst removed that had been growing on my ovary: I was told it had hair, teeth, and brain matter. I called it my cyst-er.
RoutineOther7887:
It's called a teratoma.
Weight loss surgery cures diabetes.
I’m talking about type 2, **diabeetus** diabetes. And not from the weight loss, it happens almost immediately. Somehow it perturbs the gut flora and that’s what causes diabetes, maybe?
The Nobel prize in 2006 was given to a research doctor theorized it was bacteria, not stomach acid & stress that caused ulcers. Unable to get funding for research, he drank an *H. Pilori* milk shake and gave himself ulcers. (He was Australian because of course he was.)
Fecal transplants have been known to cure Crohn’s disease, but have also been found to transmit clinical depression from donor to recipient.
All this is to say, we don’t know **f**k-all** about the gut.
Current research into gut micro biome and fibromyalgia too https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32116215/
If we were built to actually digest them, we could get our daily 2000 calories by eating the full-mouth sets of teeth from 55 adult humans. Crunch crunch.
TamLux
Ma! They're posting weird s**t on the internet again!
Recently, I found out that the human jaw muscles are powerful enough to crush teeth. It's limited only by the strength of our own teeth.
Your immune system can just decide to attack whatever
It can decide that your hair follicles are a deadly threat and make you bald. It can go after your spinal cord and make it so your legs feel like they're on fire 24/7. It can attack your organs and cause damage severe enough to necessitate a transplant. It can eat holes in your brain. It can tear up your joints. You can even wake up blind because your eyes were on your immune system's hitlist for today.
I think people are aware of autoimmune conditions, but I think most people don't think about how much can go wrong.
Things I learned (from my doctors and my own reading) after I found out I was having twins:
1. At age 35, a woman’s odds of having a multiples pregnancy drastically increases…and it continues to increase each year. This is due to your body’s response to preparing for menopause by releasing more than one egg at a time. The older you are when you get pregnant (pre-menopause), the more likely you could have a multiples pregnancy.
2. You are likely to be the most fertile right before you begin menopause. Ever hear of a “change of life baby”?
3. If you already have had a multiples pregnancy, your odds of another one greatly increases.
4. People frequently ask, “Do twins run in your family?” Fraternal twins (two fertilized eggs) are the only genetic twins. Women get the gene to release more than one egg through their mother and her mother and her mother…. Identical twins (one egg that splits) is random nature and can happen at any time.
5. African American women are the most likely to have twins over any other race. Caucasian women over 35 have the highest rates of triplet or more pregnancies. (In the USA)
6. If you have a higher BMI (30+), you’re more likely to have a multiples pregnancy.
And yet, when you reach menopausal age, you have a greatly increased risk of miscarriage, dying during pregnancy or childbirth, and health issues during pregnancy (such as preeclampsia, placenta previa, and gestational diabetes.) The baby itself also has a greatly increased risk of having congenital/birth defects/abnormalities, such as Down syndrome (at age 20, the risk is 1 in 1,440; at age 40, the risk is 1 in 84.) It's obviously possible to have a healthy pregnancy and healthy baby if you get pregnant at/past age 35-40ish, but it's just a LOT riskier for both mother and child.
Taking antibiotics can cause psychiatric symptoms.
It's not common but it's not rare, either. If you are taking antibiotics and experience derealization / depersonalization, you need to stop, immediately.
The cause of this is not well understand but it's generally thought to be something to do with serotonin. Gut microbes modulate about 60% of your serotonin so that you can use it, and antibiotics disrupt your microbiome severely.
Curiously, patients with pre-existing psychiatric symptoms sometimes see improvement when they take antibiotics.
Source: ex-microbiologist who researched gut flora for years.
Also: a lot of people in this thread are talking about fecal transplants, and I want to mention that those transplants are NOT easy. You have to nuke the existing biome to establish the transplant which is very hard to do and very hard on the body. A lot of those transplants don't "take." And even if they do, the body can revert back to its old microbiome (and associated conditions) due to the recipient's diet and location. Microbiomes do not exist in a vaccuum; what you eat, where you live, who you hang out with, all of this influences what kind of microbes live inside you. So the fecal transplant, while promising, is still very much in its "research" phase and should not be thought of as some kind of simple miracle cure.
What makes measles such a dangerous disease is that it causes a sort of amnesia of the immune system that can last as long as a year or two.
That and it kills a good percentage of the people it infects. Particularly in non-Europeans
Everyone knows that if you feel a lump in your breast you gotta get that s**t checked out, but there are actually [twelve symptoms of breast cancer]
Something around 2% of the world's population hears "The Hum." Those excessively loud and thumping sound systems in cars can be borderline torturous
Enjoy the rabbit hole.
I hear it. Sometimes two or three times a year, sometimes not for a year or so. The amount of people that can't/have never heard it and say "Oh, it's tinnitus/road works/traffic noise/a helicopter" etd! No It's Not! Completely different!
If you have a rib removed (say for a surgery), the younger you are the more likely that rib is to grow back.
A lot of bone breaks don't hurt that much. I work in radiology and while we don't see the nasty breaks you do in trauma (which often REALLY hurt), we see a lot of broken toes, fingers, metacarpals and metatarsals. Those breaks are often not easy to distinguish from muscle or tendon strain without imaging and the patient is acting completely normal. I used to think breaking anything would have someone on the floor in agony but a lot of them are like "yeah it hurts when I bend it."
If you want nightmare fuel: sometimes your spine can spontaneously break under its own weight. This is called a compression fracture.
Can confirm, both times a broke something (foot and arm, a few years apart). The arm didn't hurt that bad except when I tried to use it, but it was impossible to twist my hand. The foot was bruised and swollen but I still had to wait to go to the doctor because "you're not crying so it's not broken, you just twisted it, put ice on it!"
Humans can live with one lung, the remaining one will expand and partially fill the rest of the chest cavity, which can lead to cardiac distress. It's not the most pleasant existence, but people have made it up to 30 years like that.
If you have an allogenic bone marrow transplant, your blood type will change to the donor’s and your bone marrow and blood will contain the donor’s DNA. For example, if you are a male and your donor is a female and you do a blood DNA test your results will show that you are a female. Since the rest of your cellular structure is your own, a DNA mouth swab test would show you are a male. This is known as chimerism.
Many doctors don’t believe that fibromyalgia, POTS, chronic fatigue, or chronic Lyme disease are real. Or should I say that most doctors know the patient’s symptoms are real, but believe the symptoms have psychological origin rather than a physiological.
I don't think Lyme disease fits with the rest of the group - it has a well understood pathology.. The others (I'm a FM sufferer) tend to be thought of as "Somatic" which simply means that we can't find a physical cause for the pain. Some people will confuse this with "psychosomatic" where there is a psychological element, but most in the medical field understand that this is not the same thing. So no, they don't really think those conditions are psychological for the most part.
All mammals have seven cervical vertebrae. Giraffes have the same as humans, they're just huge.
The only mammals that don't are manatees and sloths.
Then shouldn't it read "Almost all mammals" if manatees and sloths are exempt?
In the mental health world, when someone becomes mentally sick, their ability to recognize them becoming ill is taken away. It’s called prodromal. It’s really sad to see this happen to the people you love. How they change and not know it’s happening.
So then they refuse treatment as well and it complicates things even further. :(
Possibly been noted before - but humans are naturally covered in cool stripes - mostly across the back. They are unique to each human.
They are not visible under our visual spectrum, but certain other animals can see them. It's a shame we can't, because I think they look awesome.
I have a fun rare condition called “dextracardia.”
It means that my heart is on the right side of my chest, instead of the left per usual. Sometimes this can be a more complicated condition where other organs are switched, but for me it’s just my heart. For me, it doesn’t cause any major issues. But if involved other organs, it could create complications. So yay for me? I like to say that my heart is always in the “right” place 🙃.
Your gut bacteria plays a big part in your overall wellness and affects your mental health even. You're depression may or may not be in some part caused by lacking a certain bacteria or the presence of another.
garrettj100:
Fecal transplants have transmitted clinical depression from donor to recipient.
The mold from which the first antibiotics were harvested were first discovered from a young French med student Ernest Duchesne, noticing that Arab stable boys would keep horse saddles in damp, dark places to encourage mold growth. This reduced the amount and severity of saddle sores. Wrote a paper on it but didn’t receive credit. Several decades later and Fleming makes Penicillin.
Sneezing fits can cause orgasms and orgasms can cause sneezing fits.
If you take a medication, it will kick in fastest if you are lying down on your right side. A recent study found this out. They had assumed that standing would be the best position, but they found out the stomach works better lying down on your right side.
Depending on the meds this may or may not be desirable. It's based on the tablet going into the most empty part of the stomach, which may be a bad thing if you are prone to gastric problems as when taking NSAIDs, for example, and also there are many d***s that specifically need to be ingested with food.
You can get skin cancer in areas not exposed to the sun.
There are a million nerve fibres that form the optic nerve in each eye.
I was diagnosed with Retinoblastoma at 6 weeks of age (in Feb 1972). My amazing Specialist (Surgeon) removed my right eye and optic nerve. He managed to save all 6 muscles, and my tear duct. On a 6 week old baby. In 1972. He was an amazing man, an amazing Surgeon. He and I had a conversation once when I was in my late teens. Said he walked in to theatre that day, and walked all the way up to the top of the theatre table. He said to me "and there you were, this tiny, little baby wrapped in surgical drape, and my hand shook for a bit. It's was one of the hardest procedures I have ever done. That incredible man saved my life.
It’s common for people in motor vehicle accidents to sustain a ruptured bladder.
Moral: pee before you get into a car.
There's certain conditions where your bowel can leak into your stomach and you vomit s**t.
It's called feculent vomiting.
Bowel obstruction being one, it basically backs up behind the blockage until it can find a way out. Not pleasant to see, but that must have been a darn sight more unpleasant for the poor patient.
When they remove your guts for surgery, they just jam them back in once finished and they settle back into place on their own.
I'm suspicious as to how we figured this out 🤨 Surgeon: *looks at watch* Eh, just shove it all in there, I've got theatre tickets.
Fat is not inert. One pound of fat has about five miles of blood vessels to support it. That's a lot of an extra load on our heart. .
Not moving for long periods of time can increase your chance of blood clots, especially as you get older.
That's why you should try to stand up and walk around a bit on long air flight.
There’s a medical condition called ‘Stone Man Syndrome’ where your muscles and tissues slowly turn to bone. Your body basically starts building an extra skeleton inside you, and there’s no cure. It’s rare, but terrifying.
I think we take for granted that we're constantly teetering on the edge of not-surviving. You have a few MINUTES of oxygen in your body. Your life up to now has required hundreds of thousands of hours of routine heart beating and breathing to not-die - it's not something you can be good at just 99.9% of the time. Your brain is the most complex thing in the known universe, but it still is only a few MINUTES away from death if it doesn't get oxygen.
Right now, take a deep breath in and feel your heartbeat. If either stopped happening, that clock starts ticking and it's all over. The pituitary is cool and has some neat tricks up its sleeve, your gut and microbiome are crazy, but that's all irrelevant if your brain misses out on a few minutes of oxygen. We can make iPhones and stream live video from the space station, but all of us have a countdown timer that could start at any second. That system is so simple and elegant, but also so terrifying.
Roughly half of the world's population is iron deficient, of whom about half have iron deficiency anemia.
Iron affects literally every part of your body, from how cold your feet are to whether you exhibit symptoms of bipolar disorder. Seriously consider looking into it if you have any unexplained symptoms. If you have restless legs syndrome, get a blood test for ferritin *now*. A level of 100 is recommended but doctors will sometimes say that as little as 40 is fine (edit: which the published sources I've encountered disagree with. In any case, there's no harm increasing your ferritin to 100).
Yes but I also have Iron metabolism disorders so I can't take iron tablets because I hold on to too much of it or my body gets rid of all of it.
Women's bodies naturally produce significantly more testosterone than estrogen.
As testosterone is the precursor of estrogen (substrate for aromatase.) So, men or women, most estrogen molekules in our body was once a testosterone molecule.
One way to fix a prolapsed r****m is to pour sugar on it. Just good ole pure white cane sugar. I’ve actually seen this done.
Performing CPR often breaks ribs.
Yep, it’s not a gentle thing like they portray in movies/TV. It’s brutal particularly when performed on someone who is frail and elderly. I’m thankful that my Dad put a Do not attempt resuscitation order (DNAR) in place so he could just go peacefully. NB the medic/paramedic has to physically see the paperwork otherwise they will attempt CPR. I remember the paramedic trying to discreetly ask me if Dad had a DNAR in place, Dad overheard, cheerfully told him where it was, and that when his heart stops that’s it for him. He slipped away quietly a couple of hours later.
Erectile dysfunction can be a precursor to heart disease. The penile arteries are only slightly smaller than the coronary arteries; once they start blocking up causing ED the coronaries are soon to follow (approx 2 years).
According to a 2016 study by Johns Hopkins Medicine, medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States, k*lling over 250,000 people each year.
You can taste salt when given a saline IV because it diffuses out of the blood in your lungs.
It’s tastes metallic and a little lemony to me. Also, iron infusions taste like burnt caramel with a metallic finish
You can end up with too much or too little cerebral spinal fluid, and its REALLY HARD for doctors to figure out that somethings wrong with your CSF cause it doesnt really show up on standard CTs or MRIs. And its rare enough that most neuros dont think of it as a first line issue.
They also suck at it, and use outdated or bad information in their diagnosis. Having optic nerve damage is a sign csf pressure is high, but not having optic nerve damage doesnt mean youre fine.
It's unfortunately a common mistake, and theres potentially a lot of people misdiagnosed with chronic migraine who actually have a cerebral spinal fluid issue.
The only actual test is a lumbar puncture to get the real pressure inside your head.
You really shouldn't use those hot air blowers to dry your hands in bathrooms...likewise.. ffs put down the lid when you flush...iykyk.
That tumour markers in your blood work are no good for detecting Some cancers, notably bowel cancer. Schedule a routine colonoscopy and listen to your body for symptoms. I received blood results that said no tumour markers but then gave my doc a symptom list that had him send me for an immediate colonoscopy. I had stage three cancer. So as it happens medically some tumours do not show up in bloods, listen to the body or better yet once you hit forty schedule a routine colonoscopy as sometimes it’s symptomless until it’s way too late.
Routine colonoscopies are not a thing where I live. You have to have symptoms first. Although they do test for blood in your stools once a year after you hit 50.
The human body is ridiculously efficient. You live, day to day, off of roughly 2000 calories, even less if you've stored up enough fat. Animals of equivalent mass to us regularly 10,000.
one of the biggest reasons why neanderthals died out was simply because they required about 10,000 or more calories daily just to be alive while humans were far more efficient.
There are people that feel nauseated before sneezing, and the body gets confused thinking it's going to throw up, but then just sneezes.
It is medically recognized that right before a heart attack most patients feel a "sense of doom".
CPR was intended to treat younger people whose hearts had stopped due to trauma. It was not intended to be used on 85 year olds with multiple disease processes.
Rubbish. The intent of CPR is to keep the body alive in case the heart may start functioning correctly again (with or without the use of a defibrillator). The chances of the heart recovering are much higher in younger otherwise-healthy people, but this absolutely does not mean that there's no point in doing it for older and iller people.
Breast cancer treatment hasn't significantly improved from a mortality and morbidity point of view in the last decade. Despite this, it overwhelmingly gets more funding than other deadlier and similarly common types of cancer (e.g. bowel cancer).
Your nerves conduct electrical signals at over 50m/s when healthy. Over 100mph if you prefer freedom units. It’s very complicated process of ions moving across cell membranes to propagate a signal from one spot to another yet happens so fast. Nerves are cool.
Even though there's several tests to evaluate lung function/capacity, there is apparently also a cell found in your blood that indicates you have asthma.
source: my doc after two hours of lung testing.
Until relatively recently (into the 1980s!) babies who were operated on got little to no pain relief because medical science didn’t know what the effect on tiny humans would be. I repeat: babies were operated on without anesthetics. This information was brought to you by someone who had eyesurgery as a 1 year old in the 1970s.
They did not believe babies felt pain or had pain receptors yet. Kinda how they act like our uterus’s don’t.
Load More Replies...Until relatively recently (into the 1980s!) babies who were operated on got little to no pain relief because medical science didn’t know what the effect on tiny humans would be. I repeat: babies were operated on without anesthetics. This information was brought to you by someone who had eyesurgery as a 1 year old in the 1970s.
They did not believe babies felt pain or had pain receptors yet. Kinda how they act like our uterus’s don’t.
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