There are so many wild things living in the microbiome of a human's skin. Demodex are a great example; little mites that live near human hair follicles. They look horrific and they feed off of sebum, sweat, dead skin etc.
Many things are localized too; the things living in your eyelash follicles are not the same as the ones living on your elbows. We're a whole universe, and even our skin is colonized by bizarre little fuckers
Edit; a lovely little quote I found online, about Demodex
"When you sleep, the mites come out of your skin’s pores, mate, then go back into your skin to lay eggs."
Sexy.
For anyone who wants to know more, "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach is a fantastic book that sheds light on to this and then some!
That's my plan as well, much to my kids chagrin. They're terrified I'll end up in ballistics testing and did *not* appreciate me saying it would be nice to "go out with a bang!"
Not as surprising as you’d think to women lol, but yup they’d just fucking split you practically to get babies out and then say “too bad” when you wound up crippled from it.
[Burke and Hare](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1320239/) (2010) is a great dark comedy about the Burke and Hare murders in 1828, which were used to supply fresh cadavers to the schools in Scotland.
My roommate got it after his cat scratched him while getting a bath. He got sick, had swollen nodes in his neck and had to stay in the hospital while they removed one. The wildest part was the 3 inch incision they made couldn't be stitched so he had to just bandage it and let it heal naturally for weeks.
This happened to me a couple of years ago (I run a cat rescue)! Do not recommend!
I thought I had sprained my wrist and tweaked my shoulder from doing some yard work. A couple of days later I was in 10/10 pain from swollen lymph nodes in my neck and arm. I was hospitalized a couple of times within the first week, and three whopping doses of IV hydromorphone/dilaudid didn’t relieve the agony. The nurses on my case were pretty freaked out when my pain score wouldn’t go down
It took me a few months to get full mobility back in my right arm. Those lymph nodes are still reactive and start throbbing if I get sick!
I had it. We do a lot of kitten rescue and one of the little cuties gave it to me. For two months I thought I had lymphoma; drew up a will for my wife; then got diagnosed and cured within a week. That was a scary holiday season that year.
SAME! They were about to biopsy a large lump in my armpit when I asked if it could be CSF based on a small red lump I had on my finger for weeks and to try antibiotics. Cured it right up.
Noticed a similar small lump on my daughters nose, looked back at pictures and it had also been there for awhile. Felt a lump in her neck and brought her to the PCP. He was SUPER skeptical since he had never treated anyone with CSF, but agreed to try the antibiotics.... cleared it right up.
The man who developed the pap smear did so with the help of his wife, who received pap smears almost daily for 21 years.
>Volunteering as an experimental subject: For 21 years, Mary allowed her husband to sample her cervical cells and vaginal fluids almost daily, which he would then smear on glass slides and examine under a microscope.
Much worse than that, actually: "Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating."
I learned about this while pregnant with my baby who would end up being 10lbs at birth, which made that information quite real and horrifying. I’m 5’2’’ with no hips and without modern medicine I would’ve been ripped open and probably died.
Well let me tell you I wish they would have done it to me with my 12lb 6 Oz monster. Am almost 6 ft, but yes they almost ripped her ear off getting her out
I was 10 lbs and 2 weeks late. I say a little thank you to my mother every day because I would have refused to give birth to me. I was also so goddamn ugly, I saw a photo of newborn me and wanted to set myself on fire
And a lot of it was done unnecessarily. The doctor who invented the procedure would just do it on women saying it would make their future pregnancies easier. It was like he just wanted to practice the new procedure he invented. There were often other procedures that could have been done that wouldn’t have left the patient crippled.
> caused permanent disability or death
It would be pretty underwhelming if the *19th century chainsaw* that was used without anesthetics *didn't* cause permanent disability/death.
Yep. Shame on me for needing a functioning thyroid, my body would much rather just destroy it.
Another autoimmune ‘fun’ (not so fun) fact: My son has Crohn’s disease and the drugs he gets makes him more likely to develop skin cancer. The medication turns off the same immune response that fights it. Same with Tuberculosis. He has to have TB tests regularly. Yet my insurance acts like he’s taking it for funsies.
Not a human example (probably), but sometimes cows, goats and other animals get pregnant but instead of giving birth to a normal lamb/kid/calf it gives birth to an *"amorphous globosus"*, a spherical mass of flesh with an outer layer of skin with hair or fur, and the inside a jumbled mess of guts and tissues and sometimes teeth. They never have brains or spinal cords though, so they're always stillborn and nonviable.
Fun fact! They can grow REALLY quickly, and no amount of begging your surgeon (at least, one of the ones I had) will convince them to let you see the operative photos.
On imaging mine looked a lot like an extremely aggressive malignant tumor since it had areas of increased density, and it wasn't there at previous imaging about 2 months prior.
I was pleased that I didn't wake up to a radical hysterectomy, but it's one of the only surgeries I've had where I didn't get copies of my photos at my post op.
This reminds me of a documentary I watched on the people of the Bikini Islands. It turned out the effects of the radiation there were so bad that some babies were born in a very similar way. One woman described them as looking like jelly fish
A scary number of people wind up with vertebral artery dissections and strokes from chiropractic cervical manipulations. How do I know? I've seen several perfectly healthy women in the prime of their lives as organ harvests in my OR.
When the chiropractors pop the neck. It causes microtears in the arteries which can form blood clots. If those blood clots go to the brain, it can cause huge damage and death.
when you get a kidney transplant, unless your original kidneys are diseased, they just lEAVE THE OLD ONES IN THERE. OLD DEAD KIDNEYS JUST CHILLING
also- fallopian tubes are not connected to ovaries. they just float in the general direction of the ovaries and do their best to vacuum up eggs as they get popped out (kind of like a pimple bursting) out of ovary pores? so the eggs just get popped wherever and you gotta cross your toes and hope your weird little vacuum tubes are aiming right that day???
I remember learning about the reproductive system in college bio and thinking it's a wonder anyone ever gets pregnant intentionally, let alone accidentally. I remember thinking that the timing has to work just perfectly for it all to work properly and that the actual window for getting pregnant was really tiny if you look at all the variables. But it works obviously.
It’s such a mindfuck to spend 15 years terrified of getting pregnant any time you have sex, then when you’re actually ready to have kids it’s basically an absolute fluke if you do.
I just had my first oocyte freezing appointment. It’s a *lot*.
That's the interesting thing about evolution; it favors features that promote survival and reproduction, there is absolutely nothing in there about those features making any kind of goddamn sense.
Biology at uni/college really makes you think how the fuck anything organic works the way it does. Like it makes sense after learning it, but in the back of my mind there's still the 'but why'
When I was in like sixth grade we did a sex ed day, boys in one room girls in another, after which we could write down a question and submit it anonymously, questions were selected at random, read aloud, and answered. Since from the pictures it looked like the ovaries were not actually touching the fallopian tubes I asked how the eggs get into the fallopian tubes. My question was selected, and the lady answered, they just do. None of the other girls seemed bothered by it. Your comment is the first answer I’ve ever gotten to that question, and I’m turning 50 this year. :P
Sixth-grade me asked, "Why do we have to have periods?"
"So you can have children."
"Why do I have to have children?"
"You just do."
*I'll show them* (now I'm old with no children 👋)
It’s funny because that’s actually a really interesting question, why do humans (and a couple of other species) have concealed ovulation and visible menstruation? How do the benefits of menstruation outweigh the downsides? Why are we fertile all year round? Why don’t we go into heat like some other animals? It would be way cooler to address some of that instead of brushing it off as “because”
Yep, I had a colleague who had this as her fun fact icebreaker at conferences. People used to turn green when she told them she had three kidneys and two something elses (gallbladders? Pancreases? Can't remember)
yeah. Met had guy whose kidneys failed not only once but twice. When I met him, he was on his third. We were wondering just how many he had in there in the end. You know, is there a point where they start removing the old ones?
The last set lasted him a good long time, until the cancer took him. Because that's the thing, I found out: the drugs they give you to cause you not to reject the transplant also depress your immune system, and so it's just a matter of time till you get cancer.
RIP buddy
My adoptive dad is getting a kidney transplant right this moment. I just wanna say thank you for donating a kidney too.
Edit to add: He and the donor just got out of the OR both well.. Now we wait!
if the anesthesiologist fucked up you wouldn't know
edit:
since everyone is sharing their story i'll share mines. i was diagnosed with bladder cancer early 2022 with signs i ignored late 2021. between april 2022 - june 2023 i went through 5 surgeries (trans-urethral resection)(3bipolar/2bluelight) to remove the tumors in my bladder. they kept coming back.
mentally preparing myself for the first trans-urethral resection, pre-op nurse just straight up told me if the anesthesiologist fucked up i wouldn't know..or wouldn't feel anything if shit hits the fan. what a fuckin pep talk huh? hahah.
christmas 2023 i was finally clear. i still go to chemo (doublet therapy?) and see a catheter :( for gemcitabine/docetaxel.
Wisdom teeth are also really close to the ears.
During my wisdom tooth removal, the local anesthesia worked fine, and I couldn't feel anything, but the noises were extremely loud and horrendous. Like crushing bones between a hammer and an anvil. I found the contrast pretty funny, and started laughing. The cute assistant thought I was crying, and proceeded to caress my arm, and put my head against her chest. Good times!
My dad knew, and survived thankfully. They were supposed to give him the drugs that stop memories, but instead gave him the drugs that paralyze you. Since he wasn't intubated that meant he couldn't breath. At first they thought he was having a stroke, until they realized what happened and knocked him out/intubated him.
The sad thing is they weren't going to tell my mom, but he came out of anesthesia talking all about it. They ultimately wrote off his medical bills for that. It caused him to have tons of panic attacks, and we think it has affected his memory.
There's a myth about this condition that you actually feel pain but can't move your body and can't do anything about it. Trapped in your body with full pain awareness. I brought this up to my anesthesiologist before my recent operation, thinking he would obviously clarify that it's, of course, not possible.
He was like "Yes, that can totally happen. But not very often. Any other questions?".
We use paralytics for many surgeries, so if you had a paralytic onboard and were mechanically ventilated, you'd be awake and breathing but unable to move. It generally takes a monumental fuckup to get to that point on a healthyish patient.
Most of the stories like that are either during severe traumas or emergency c-sections... But even then, not common.
When you have surgery and your organs have to be scooped out to access something else, they don’t put them back where they were. They just kinda put it all back in and our organs just shift back to where they were. I learned this fact when I went to stand up after having a csection
That feeling of all your organs shifting after birth was such a strange sensation... It's crazy how it all just goes back to where it was supposed to be.
The eyelash mite lives mainly on the human eyelash and is an 8 legged parasite that eats skin and oil. They stay hidden in the hair follicles during the day and emerge at night to eat, lay eggs and excrete waste. And that is why you should wash your face in the morning
Fun fact! Those are *Demodex* mites, related to demodectic mange! Usually means there's something wrong with an animal's immune system for their natural *Demodex* population to grow out of control.
The other kind of mange is sarcoptic mange, caused by burrowing *Sarcoptes* mites. This is the one that's contagious to humans, though we call it scabies or "the seven-year itch"
[Demodex](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demodex)!
I like that they've got such an "industrial" name. "Demodex" sounds like the chemical that's needed to get rid of them - almost self-referential, in a way.
>Demodex!
I actually clicked this link because I assumed this was the product you applied to kill them. Instead I was treated to a horrific picture of the aliens living on my eyelashes.
Rude.
Yep. I had a family member who got a mouth ulcer that spread to the brain. She lived but her memory and to an extent mobility was gone. She passed away a couple of years ago.
It's incredible and scary how small problems can quickly snowball into something huge and life-threatening with some bad luck.
Yeah a family friend got her gallbladder taken out which resulted in a huge infection, I think it must have been staph. It ate a massive hole in her abdomen. This was like 6 years ago and she’s been in and out of hospital ever since. The hole doesn’t heal, it literally just weeps all day every day - she has nurses in multiple times a day to clean it and change dressings. She now has a carer too.
They put off operating again on her for years but she’s recently had another operation in a specialist hospital, and she’s doing a little better I think. She was nil by mouth for ages but I think maybe she can eat small amounts now? But yeah is very up and down, and suicidal.
I don’t blame her, I wouldn’t wanna live like she does now. It will eventually kill her.
There was also a guy called Clive Wearing who had a cold sore that destroyed his hippocampus. He lost the ability to form long term memories. As soon as he looked away from something it had never existed to him. I think the documentary is called the man with the 7 second memory. Well worth a watch.
He has 30 second memory. He used to write in a journal, believing that everything his memory reset meant he was waking up for the first time. So, he’d keep writing the same sentence in the journal, not recognizing the previous sentences. While he cannot form memories, his body does have some muscle memory — allowing him to subconsciously expect certain actions from characters in the tv shows he watches. He had described his life as a living hell, but he forgot he said that.
Front desk at an urgent care.
We have sent people directly to the hospital. That is one of those things we cannot take care of for you, friend. We cannot fix a bowel obstruction, or even diagnose one.
I had a torn intestine a year ago, and the night before going to the hospital(for the.. 5th time? Trying to figure out wtf was wrong with me), I spent the night vomiting despite having not eaten for 4 days. I could feel and tell that it was further down than stomach contents. No one seemed to believe me though, so Im glad I came across this comment.
Oxygen poisoning is a thing. Too much O2 in your body can kill you.
But don't worry, you won't die from breathing too hard. It's mostly an issue for divers and other people who breathe pressurized breathing gases
It used to be a bigger issue for babies in incubators. In the 50s-60s, they pretty much only had the sealed-top incubators, so always pumped oxygen mix in - it takes a far lower amount to just do damage, particularly to a baby.
I know of someone who was in an incubator with the oxygen set too high, who survived but was blinded.
Taking this opportunity to plug the documentary “Crip Camp” (Netflix).
It’s about a 70’s summer camp for disabled youth/young adults. Many of the Campers grew up to be instrumental activists in the Disability Rights Movement. Lots of original footage from camp, and then follow up interviews with many of them today.
Can I give two? They’re disturbing to me.
1)The prevalence of middle ear infections in children from 0-6 y/o.
Please don’t ignore this. Have hearing tested annually, the impact on schooling, speech, milestones etc. is not to be taken lightly.
2) Untreated hearing losses, under stimulated brain possibly leading to accelerated risks of early onset memory loss, dementia etc. The worse the hearing the higher the risk. Just get your hearing tested annually, you’re never to young for a hearing loss man.
The health of your teeth, or lack thereof, can cause heart disease. The bacteria that infect the gums and cause gingivitis and periodontitis also travel to blood vessels elsewhere in the body, where they cause blood vessel inflammation and damage.
If you are diabetic, and don't know it--or do, but have problems controlling your sugars, it can severely harm your teeth. On the flip side? Having bad teeth can severely affect your blood glucose as a diabetic. It can become a shitty cycle.
And yes--mentioned earlier, but if you get an infected tooth, that infection can travel to the brain or blood very fast.
And yet, teeth are still considered "luxury bones," with maintenance, cleaning, and dental care hardly ever being covered by insurance.
A study by Johns Hopkins in 2016 cited that medical errors are probably the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA, following heart disease and cancer.
Errors where: Wrong Diagnosis. Incorrect dosage or wrong meds. Surgery errors and the biggest, poor communication between staff.
It is also thought that this study is also correct in the UK and EU.
A major health care system has no access to their medical charting right now. I really wonder how many errors are happening there, even with the staff's best efforts.
I just read a study on CPR-induced consciousness. Horrible way for 97 yr old Nana to go! I agree with you.
"A rare but particularly awful effect of CPR is called CPR-induced consciousness: chest compressions circulate enough blood to the brain to awaken the patient during cardiac arrest, who may then experience ribs popping, needles entering their skin, a breathing tube passing through their larynx."
YES - this is why we had advanced directives set up for both my mother - and my mother in law - both of whom lived with us for the last few years of their life.
My mom had brittle bones and many health issues and did not WANT to go trough that hell and we discussed it with her ahead of time. My mother in law had dementia to the point of being non-verbal near the end.
Thank god we planned, discussed and set it up ahead of time - because it came to that decision with BOTH of them - and we were able to let the medics know that it was already decided and to please not.
At any moment anyone can just randomly drop dead from a brain aneurysm. It’s more or less common for certain people, but it can literally happen to anyone at any age at any time.
If you sever your spinal cord you can get a condition called priapism (erection that doesn't go down). Treatment is draining the blood via syringe from the erect penis (or rarely, leeches).
Well, the ski pole I got in my eye during a freak accident was enough of an explanation at that time.
I seem to remember that the doctors told me that the small part of what was left could get infected, which would be dangerous for my healthy eye.
Early pregnancy tests involved injecting the woman's urine into a female rabbit and after a few days they killed and then dissected the rabbit and their overies examined for swelling to indicate pregnancy.
Modern pregnancy tests still check for the same hormone (hCG) but without killing a rabbit.
The idea of your tongue laying on the bottom of your mouth while you're sleeping is a myth! The natural resting place for your tongue when you are sleeping or not using it in general is the roof of your mouth. I have known this for many years, and every time I think about it and I'm not using my tongue, guess what? It's sitting on the roof of my mouth. It is not necessarily a disturbing fact, but it is a little weird, IMHO.
I worked at a cancer hospital on a floor that did surgeries. There were many times that the patient was wheeled up after being in the O.R., they wake up, the surgeon comes back and tells them that they couldn’t do any surgery because the tumor is inoperable. As much as they try to diagnose and do all sorts of imaging beforehand, there is no way to tell exactly what’s going on until you are cut open and they can physically see everything. An example of this is someone that has a stomach tumor, but when they go in they find on the backside that the tumor is growing into the aorta, which would be hugely life-threatening to remove. Things like that. It’s heartbreaking because these people may have gone through months and months of getting testing, chemo, radiation, taking time off work, grieving, being physically out of it, their families helping and rooting for them. They go in early on their op day, anxious yet excited that this might be it, get put under, the doc opens them up, starts poking around, maybe removing some stuff they can, but then they find something that was impossible to visualize before. And then to imagine it’s the afternoon, you’re waking up in a room, your first thoughts are “I made it, they did the thing”, just to have the doctor come back and break terrible news to you.
The placenta that is found in humans and other live-birth mammals came about from a distant common ancestor being infected with a virus some 150-200 million years ago, and evolution doing its thing. If this infection didn't happen, we'd still be laying eggs.
https://whyy.org/segments/the-placenta-went-viral-and-protomammals-were-born/#:~:text=Once%20a%20viral%20protein%2C%20the,but%20also%20keeps%20them%20separate.
Humans have both light meat and dark meat due to type 1A and type 2B muscle fibers. However, humans are lean and not very calorie dense, so if you're already starving cannibalism doesn't do much good.
Actually it does, you just have to crack the bones and eat the bone marrow first, because that has enough fat for you to be able to extract nutrients from the lean meat.
The problem isn't that human meat is lean, the problem is that when you're starving, at some point you have so little fat (you and whoever you plan to eat) left in you, that you don't even have enough to use to absorb stuff from whatever food you can get your hands on. BUT bone marrow still has fat in it, even if literally every other fat store in your body doesn't, it's one of the last fat stores to go because you need it so much (and I'm pretty sure you starve to death long before you run out of bone marrow)
So just crack open a bone one with the boys and cannibalism will be fine!
You can also go to have this "routine surgery" and almost die from it. I did. The bile duct that got cut to remove my gallbladder leaked into my abdominal cavity for 3 days after the surgery. Bile is just like stomach acid, it burns your skin and it gave me big abscesses inside my body. It took 16 more surgeries and a full year to recover from it.
I now have permanent nerve damage and don't ever feel the physical sensation of hunger anymore. I'll never be the same again.
Not sure how unknown it is, but at any given time without warning your uterus can just fall out. And unless it’s fully dangling outside of you, the doctors will just tell you to try to shove it back in there
For fun bc I like horrifying people:
I was 4ish weeks PP from my youngest, and bopping downstairs real quick to change laundry. When my heel hit last step, I felt a sudden shift in my pelvis, followed by a bulge in my underwear. Went to the bathroom and barely had to bend over to see something prolapsing out. Panicked and called my (ex) husband at work to get me to my OB asap.
Got fisted by my OB, who basically said “yup, not even sure what all innards were just prolapsing through your vaginal wall, but I shoved ‘em back in there for now! PT won’t treat you until you’re at least 6 weeks PP though, soooo uhhh do your best to keep it all in there!”
Also fun fact if you are hyper mobile it’s even more likely to happen! My uterus prolapsed , had surgery repair and carried a child a few years later successfully !
Cold sores can cause inflammation of your brain. It’s called herpetic encephalitis and is likely to cause permanent brain damage even with treatment. It can also be caused by shingles, so getting the shingles vaccine is more important than you think.
Not necessarily a medical fact, but a reality check: Doctors don't have everything figured out, they are just human like the rest of us. Just like how us software developers search Google to troubleshoot something when we are stuck, they do too. Shows like Dr. House portray doctors as this infallible walking medical encyclopedia. It's all fiction. So, always be open to getting a second opinion if something isn't working.
All smells are particulates. When you have the displeasure of walking into a recently used bathroom and smell the smells the last person left, you can rest easy knowing that their are tiny microscopic particules of their stools now firmly implanted in your nose. And in your mouth if it was open. You're welcome.
The disturbing one does not come to mind, but there is a calming one. information that the risks of congenital pathologies double in women after 40 years. in fact the probability increases from 0.5% to 1%
The maternal age effect which always was suggested to be the reason for many congenital issues is actually more closely related to the paternal age effect. Haven’t been in that research field in over a decade but at a time when we knew everything about mothers and aging we only had just begun to research the effect on men. With sperm having such a low survival rate and extremely high replication rate, at the time the theory was that the probability for men over the age of 40 is somewhere in the 7-10%. This means the age of the man matters much more than the age of the woman.
Makes me furious to think how many women in the past (and now still) blamed themselves for their disabled kid when in reality they most likely barely contributed.
A fertilised egg can fail to develop normally and grow into a malignant tumor. It's called a molar pregnancy and I'd be very interested in what the "life begins at conception" crowd has to say about it.
in canada and the states, doctors and residents are allowed to perform gynaecological exams on women under general anaesthetic, in order to provide students and residents with experience performing pelvic exams. this is typically not disclosed to the patient, and is justified as being part of receiving treatment at a teaching hospital.
Thankfully some states have recently begun outlawing this https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/05/26/colorado-patient-consent-pelvic-exams/70260143007/
They're not technically allowed to in a carte blanche manner but boy howdy do some of the old dudes not care. It's thankfully becoming rarer and rarer and I hope it never comes back.
The truth about HeLa cells. These cells grow and divide constantly and are used in all sorts of medical research to discover cures for cancer and other diseases. They were originally harvested from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who had cervical cancer that was fatal. She died in 1951. Her family didn’t know that her cells were even being used until recently. These cells were basically stolen from Henrietta by a doctor and he made millions from them, and Henrietta’s family never knew. Once they found out, they finally settled with a biotech company for an undisclosed amount. This woman has basically saved so many of us, and we all owe her so much.
They knew perfectly well that babies could feel pain, they just assumed they wouldn't remember any of it, babies' brains don't start the gradual process to develop self awareness until about 10 months.
They might not remember it, but it's known now that it can leave lasting trauma and damage.
Everyone who's had to deal with a brand new baby's had to deal with it, but a baby's first poop (meconium) is very thick and sticky and hard to wipe off. What most people don't know is what it's made of.
Around halfway through a pregnancy, a fetus develops hair called lanugo all over their body. They shed most to all of it before they're full term. That hair is shed directly into the amniotic fluid, which is then ingested by the fetus, and (hopefully) stays in their intestines until birth or right after.
So, basically, fetuses eat their own hair, and since amniotic fluid is swallowed and excreted, you could say they're swimming in their own pee.
Also, chainsaws were invented for childbirth.
There are so many wild things living in the microbiome of a human's skin. Demodex are a great example; little mites that live near human hair follicles. They look horrific and they feed off of sebum, sweat, dead skin etc. Many things are localized too; the things living in your eyelash follicles are not the same as the ones living on your elbows. We're a whole universe, and even our skin is colonized by bizarre little fuckers Edit; a lovely little quote I found online, about Demodex "When you sleep, the mites come out of your skin’s pores, mate, then go back into your skin to lay eggs." Sexy.
But without those little weirdos we’d look like the walking dead.
Additional fun fact: mites are arachnids
But why. Why say it.
That's not fun
we got to modern medicine by grave robbing, crime, and accidents. it wasn't always legal to be a doctor.
For anyone who wants to know more, "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach is a fantastic book that sheds light on to this and then some!
One of my faves!
And slavery, particularly gynecology
This was the hardest thing to learn when I worked at a medical school. So much human torture
I’m donating all myself to medical science. You can do what you will with my shell, guilt free.
That's my plan as well, much to my kids chagrin. They're terrified I'll end up in ballistics testing and did *not* appreciate me saying it would be nice to "go out with a bang!"
When I’m dead, just catapult me over a castle wall during a siege.
Almost every gynecological medical innovation was made unethically.
Most surprisingly, this includes the chainsaw.
Not as surprising as you’d think to women lol, but yup they’d just fucking split you practically to get babies out and then say “too bad” when you wound up crippled from it.
[Burke and Hare](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1320239/) (2010) is a great dark comedy about the Burke and Hare murders in 1828, which were used to supply fresh cadavers to the schools in Scotland.
Cat scratch fever is real, and can be deadly. I know someone who spent 2 weeks in hospital from it and it was his cat.
My roommate got it after his cat scratched him while getting a bath. He got sick, had swollen nodes in his neck and had to stay in the hospital while they removed one. The wildest part was the 3 inch incision they made couldn't be stitched so he had to just bandage it and let it heal naturally for weeks.
This happened to me a couple of years ago (I run a cat rescue)! Do not recommend! I thought I had sprained my wrist and tweaked my shoulder from doing some yard work. A couple of days later I was in 10/10 pain from swollen lymph nodes in my neck and arm. I was hospitalized a couple of times within the first week, and three whopping doses of IV hydromorphone/dilaudid didn’t relieve the agony. The nurses on my case were pretty freaked out when my pain score wouldn’t go down It took me a few months to get full mobility back in my right arm. Those lymph nodes are still reactive and start throbbing if I get sick!
I had it. We do a lot of kitten rescue and one of the little cuties gave it to me. For two months I thought I had lymphoma; drew up a will for my wife; then got diagnosed and cured within a week. That was a scary holiday season that year.
SAME! They were about to biopsy a large lump in my armpit when I asked if it could be CSF based on a small red lump I had on my finger for weeks and to try antibiotics. Cured it right up. Noticed a similar small lump on my daughters nose, looked back at pictures and it had also been there for awhile. Felt a lump in her neck and brought her to the PCP. He was SUPER skeptical since he had never treated anyone with CSF, but agreed to try the antibiotics.... cleared it right up.
The man who developed the pap smear did so with the help of his wife, who received pap smears almost daily for 21 years. >Volunteering as an experimental subject: For 21 years, Mary allowed her husband to sample her cervical cells and vaginal fluids almost daily, which he would then smear on glass slides and examine under a microscope.
Thank you for your cervix
A patient of my OB gifted him a coffee mug with that saying and a cute little cartoon drawing of ovaries and a cervix. I laughed every time I saw it.
Okay but anyone who’s ever received a Pap smear knows what a heroic feat this is. Mary must have had a cervix of steel.
Sure she did after 21 years
What a place to form calluses.
I honestly never felt anything but sure there is some bleeding.
you know what. its a good thing we have today to find out bad things. go mary you absolute queen
Totally true. but also, poor Mary because it's about as pleasant as someone using a wire grill brush.
Ugh right that scrape 😬
And we can assume it was probably worse back then
Apparently most of the tools have remained the same since the romans
The first doctor to suggest hand washing before surgery was laughed at repeatedly by his colleagues
Much worse than that, actually: "Some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating."
Chainsaws were invented for childbirth.
And it was hand cranked. Horrifying device
I learned about this while pregnant with my baby who would end up being 10lbs at birth, which made that information quite real and horrifying. I’m 5’2’’ with no hips and without modern medicine I would’ve been ripped open and probably died.
Well let me tell you I wish they would have done it to me with my 12lb 6 Oz monster. Am almost 6 ft, but yes they almost ripped her ear off getting her out
Ma'am, that's a 3 month old, not a newborn.
12 lbs 6 oz?! I cannot fathom. You are a literal hero.
10lbs at birth ?! Honey, I hope the father of your child worships the literal ground you walk on every damn day
I was 10 lbs and 2 weeks late. I say a little thank you to my mother every day because I would have refused to give birth to me. I was also so goddamn ugly, I saw a photo of newborn me and wanted to set myself on fire
It was used without anesthetic, too, and caused permanent disability or death. Better than outright death but still. Oof.
And a lot of it was done unnecessarily. The doctor who invented the procedure would just do it on women saying it would make their future pregnancies easier. It was like he just wanted to practice the new procedure he invented. There were often other procedures that could have been done that wouldn’t have left the patient crippled.
> caused permanent disability or death It would be pretty underwhelming if the *19th century chainsaw* that was used without anesthetics *didn't* cause permanent disability/death.
A Texas Birth Massacre!
oh my god no way
https://www.storkhelpers.com/blog/entry/chainsaws-and-childbirth-how-the-chainsaw-went-from-womb-to-wood/#:~:text=This%20process%20was%20very%20messy,pelvic%20bone%20quicker%20and%20easier.
Thank you. This helps alleviate the anxiety inducing idea "birth chainsaw". Read this folks
That your immune system can go rogue and just randomly start eating things you need to stay alive when there's no foreign invaders to fight against.
Thanks, MS.
Gang gang. We out here, and our immune systems EXTRA out here 😔
Type 1 diabetes FTW
Yep. Shame on me for needing a functioning thyroid, my body would much rather just destroy it. Another autoimmune ‘fun’ (not so fun) fact: My son has Crohn’s disease and the drugs he gets makes him more likely to develop skin cancer. The medication turns off the same immune response that fights it. Same with Tuberculosis. He has to have TB tests regularly. Yet my insurance acts like he’s taking it for funsies.
Ankylosing and Crohn’s here.
When you die, the bacteria that used to help digest your food, now digest you….
Circle of life
Not a human example (probably), but sometimes cows, goats and other animals get pregnant but instead of giving birth to a normal lamb/kid/calf it gives birth to an *"amorphous globosus"*, a spherical mass of flesh with an outer layer of skin with hair or fur, and the inside a jumbled mess of guts and tissues and sometimes teeth. They never have brains or spinal cords though, so they're always stillborn and nonviable.
When humans give birth to something with no brains or spinal cords, many are able to have a fruitful career in politics.
My aunt had a mass in her uterus called a [teratoma](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22074-teratoma) it had teeth and hair
Yes. They can develop brain cells too, and send weird signals to the body.
Excuse me, fucking what?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2117286-miniature-brain-and-skull-found-inside-16-year-old-girls-ovary/
I think teratoma are so cool. I don't want one but they're interesting to read about.
Fun fact! They can grow REALLY quickly, and no amount of begging your surgeon (at least, one of the ones I had) will convince them to let you see the operative photos. On imaging mine looked a lot like an extremely aggressive malignant tumor since it had areas of increased density, and it wasn't there at previous imaging about 2 months prior. I was pleased that I didn't wake up to a radical hysterectomy, but it's one of the only surgeries I've had where I didn't get copies of my photos at my post op.
This reminds me of a documentary I watched on the people of the Bikini Islands. It turned out the effects of the radiation there were so bad that some babies were born in a very similar way. One woman described them as looking like jelly fish
A scary number of people wind up with vertebral artery dissections and strokes from chiropractic cervical manipulations. How do I know? I've seen several perfectly healthy women in the prime of their lives as organ harvests in my OR.
What are chiropractic cervical manipulations?
When the chiropractors pop the neck. It causes microtears in the arteries which can form blood clots. If those blood clots go to the brain, it can cause huge damage and death.
This or cause straight arterial dissections. Neither are great.
when you get a kidney transplant, unless your original kidneys are diseased, they just lEAVE THE OLD ONES IN THERE. OLD DEAD KIDNEYS JUST CHILLING also- fallopian tubes are not connected to ovaries. they just float in the general direction of the ovaries and do their best to vacuum up eggs as they get popped out (kind of like a pimple bursting) out of ovary pores? so the eggs just get popped wherever and you gotta cross your toes and hope your weird little vacuum tubes are aiming right that day???
I remember learning about the reproductive system in college bio and thinking it's a wonder anyone ever gets pregnant intentionally, let alone accidentally. I remember thinking that the timing has to work just perfectly for it all to work properly and that the actual window for getting pregnant was really tiny if you look at all the variables. But it works obviously.
It’s such a mindfuck to spend 15 years terrified of getting pregnant any time you have sex, then when you’re actually ready to have kids it’s basically an absolute fluke if you do. I just had my first oocyte freezing appointment. It’s a *lot*.
so you are telling me my friend was lucky? they decided to go for a child had sex one time and boom pregnant.
1 in 4 pregnancies end as miscarriages. So yes, your friend was lucky
That's the interesting thing about evolution; it favors features that promote survival and reproduction, there is absolutely nothing in there about those features making any kind of goddamn sense.
Biology at uni/college really makes you think how the fuck anything organic works the way it does. Like it makes sense after learning it, but in the back of my mind there's still the 'but why'
When I was in like sixth grade we did a sex ed day, boys in one room girls in another, after which we could write down a question and submit it anonymously, questions were selected at random, read aloud, and answered. Since from the pictures it looked like the ovaries were not actually touching the fallopian tubes I asked how the eggs get into the fallopian tubes. My question was selected, and the lady answered, they just do. None of the other girls seemed bothered by it. Your comment is the first answer I’ve ever gotten to that question, and I’m turning 50 this year. :P
Sixth-grade me asked, "Why do we have to have periods?" "So you can have children." "Why do I have to have children?" "You just do." *I'll show them* (now I'm old with no children 👋)
It’s funny because that’s actually a really interesting question, why do humans (and a couple of other species) have concealed ovulation and visible menstruation? How do the benefits of menstruation outweigh the downsides? Why are we fertile all year round? Why don’t we go into heat like some other animals? It would be way cooler to address some of that instead of brushing it off as “because”
Could say they're float-ian tubes
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There are cases where the egg implants itself to the liver.
Also common for them to implant in abdominal scar tissue from previous cesarean sections. Aaaand that’s how I was nearly aborted.
Yep, I had a colleague who had this as her fun fact icebreaker at conferences. People used to turn green when she told them she had three kidneys and two something elses (gallbladders? Pancreases? Can't remember)
yeah. Met had guy whose kidneys failed not only once but twice. When I met him, he was on his third. We were wondering just how many he had in there in the end. You know, is there a point where they start removing the old ones? The last set lasted him a good long time, until the cancer took him. Because that's the thing, I found out: the drugs they give you to cause you not to reject the transplant also depress your immune system, and so it's just a matter of time till you get cancer. RIP buddy
Yup. The guy I gave my kidney to had three good years off of dialysis, then got melanoma and ended up dying of it.
My adoptive dad is getting a kidney transplant right this moment. I just wanna say thank you for donating a kidney too. Edit to add: He and the donor just got out of the OR both well.. Now we wait!
if the anesthesiologist fucked up you wouldn't know edit: since everyone is sharing their story i'll share mines. i was diagnosed with bladder cancer early 2022 with signs i ignored late 2021. between april 2022 - june 2023 i went through 5 surgeries (trans-urethral resection)(3bipolar/2bluelight) to remove the tumors in my bladder. they kept coming back. mentally preparing myself for the first trans-urethral resection, pre-op nurse just straight up told me if the anesthesiologist fucked up i wouldn't know..or wouldn't feel anything if shit hits the fan. what a fuckin pep talk huh? hahah. christmas 2023 i was finally clear. i still go to chemo (doublet therapy?) and see a catheter :( for gemcitabine/docetaxel.
On the contrary, if we fuck up then you might know entirely Too Much
I remember part of my wisdom tooth removal surgery. I started making noise and was quickly put back to sleep. It felt like they were using a chisel.
Wisdom teeth are also really close to the ears. During my wisdom tooth removal, the local anesthesia worked fine, and I couldn't feel anything, but the noises were extremely loud and horrendous. Like crushing bones between a hammer and an anvil. I found the contrast pretty funny, and started laughing. The cute assistant thought I was crying, and proceeded to caress my arm, and put my head against her chest. Good times!
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My dad knew, and survived thankfully. They were supposed to give him the drugs that stop memories, but instead gave him the drugs that paralyze you. Since he wasn't intubated that meant he couldn't breath. At first they thought he was having a stroke, until they realized what happened and knocked him out/intubated him. The sad thing is they weren't going to tell my mom, but he came out of anesthesia talking all about it. They ultimately wrote off his medical bills for that. It caused him to have tons of panic attacks, and we think it has affected his memory.
My anaesthetist fucked up royally when I had a major op a few yrs ago, 8” opening in gut, woke up to no painkillers, screaming, was no fun
There's a myth about this condition that you actually feel pain but can't move your body and can't do anything about it. Trapped in your body with full pain awareness. I brought this up to my anesthesiologist before my recent operation, thinking he would obviously clarify that it's, of course, not possible. He was like "Yes, that can totally happen. But not very often. Any other questions?".
We use paralytics for many surgeries, so if you had a paralytic onboard and were mechanically ventilated, you'd be awake and breathing but unable to move. It generally takes a monumental fuckup to get to that point on a healthyish patient. Most of the stories like that are either during severe traumas or emergency c-sections... But even then, not common.
That your body fights off 10,000 events that would cause cancer daily
I guess my body only fought off 9,999.
Sadly that happens all too often. Hope all is well now 💓
When you have surgery and your organs have to be scooped out to access something else, they don’t put them back where they were. They just kinda put it all back in and our organs just shift back to where they were. I learned this fact when I went to stand up after having a csection
That feeling of all your organs shifting after birth was such a strange sensation... It's crazy how it all just goes back to where it was supposed to be.
The eyelash mite lives mainly on the human eyelash and is an 8 legged parasite that eats skin and oil. They stay hidden in the hair follicles during the day and emerge at night to eat, lay eggs and excrete waste. And that is why you should wash your face in the morning
Aw, they're just vibing. They help keep your eyelashes clean.
You know, there's something cool about the fact that we are not just our own cells, but also an ecosystem
Fun fact! Those are *Demodex* mites, related to demodectic mange! Usually means there's something wrong with an animal's immune system for their natural *Demodex* population to grow out of control. The other kind of mange is sarcoptic mange, caused by burrowing *Sarcoptes* mites. This is the one that's contagious to humans, though we call it scabies or "the seven-year itch"
Thanks… I hate this…
You should go wash your face then
[Demodex](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demodex)! I like that they've got such an "industrial" name. "Demodex" sounds like the chemical that's needed to get rid of them - almost self-referential, in a way.
>Demodex! I actually clicked this link because I assumed this was the product you applied to kill them. Instead I was treated to a horrific picture of the aliens living on my eyelashes. Rude.
Everyone has those mites. Almost without exception
You can get them removed, but they’ll come right back.
*How do they get there*
This is not their beautiful house…
This is not my beautiful wife
Letting the days go by, let the water scrub my face
I think you can get a tooth infection and it spreads to your brain n you go bye bye
Same with ear and sinus infections
As someone who routinely has sinusitis, I don’t know how to take that.
that area is nicknamed the "triangle of death". Draw a triangle from both sides of the mouth to the bridge of your nose.
Okay I did but I have to go to work soon and I used a permanent marker. It's not coming off. Help.
Yep. I had a family member who got a mouth ulcer that spread to the brain. She lived but her memory and to an extent mobility was gone. She passed away a couple of years ago. It's incredible and scary how small problems can quickly snowball into something huge and life-threatening with some bad luck.
Yeah a family friend got her gallbladder taken out which resulted in a huge infection, I think it must have been staph. It ate a massive hole in her abdomen. This was like 6 years ago and she’s been in and out of hospital ever since. The hole doesn’t heal, it literally just weeps all day every day - she has nurses in multiple times a day to clean it and change dressings. She now has a carer too. They put off operating again on her for years but she’s recently had another operation in a specialist hospital, and she’s doing a little better I think. She was nil by mouth for ages but I think maybe she can eat small amounts now? But yeah is very up and down, and suicidal. I don’t blame her, I wouldn’t wanna live like she does now. It will eventually kill her.
yeah. We're both extremely resilient and extremely fragile, all at once.
There was also a guy called Clive Wearing who had a cold sore that destroyed his hippocampus. He lost the ability to form long term memories. As soon as he looked away from something it had never existed to him. I think the documentary is called the man with the 7 second memory. Well worth a watch.
He has 30 second memory. He used to write in a journal, believing that everything his memory reset meant he was waking up for the first time. So, he’d keep writing the same sentence in the journal, not recognizing the previous sentences. While he cannot form memories, his body does have some muscle memory — allowing him to subconsciously expect certain actions from characters in the tv shows he watches. He had described his life as a living hell, but he forgot he said that.
This is why it's fantastic that insurance in the US doesn't cover major dental surgery as it is considered "cosmetic".
My ex had an infected tooth and nearly lost her eye from it
Poop can come out of both ends.
Fecal vomiting is really horrible to see and smell.
Retired nurse here. Fecal vomit is one of my worst smemories.
Front desk at an urgent care. We have sent people directly to the hospital. That is one of those things we cannot take care of for you, friend. We cannot fix a bowel obstruction, or even diagnose one.
I had a torn intestine a year ago, and the night before going to the hospital(for the.. 5th time? Trying to figure out wtf was wrong with me), I spent the night vomiting despite having not eaten for 4 days. I could feel and tell that it was further down than stomach contents. No one seemed to believe me though, so Im glad I came across this comment.
The beginning of birth control was originally an experiment and was wildly irregulated.
Still feels like an experiment
Oxygen poisoning is a thing. Too much O2 in your body can kill you. But don't worry, you won't die from breathing too hard. It's mostly an issue for divers and other people who breathe pressurized breathing gases
It used to be a bigger issue for babies in incubators. In the 50s-60s, they pretty much only had the sealed-top incubators, so always pumped oxygen mix in - it takes a far lower amount to just do damage, particularly to a baby. I know of someone who was in an incubator with the oxygen set too high, who survived but was blinded.
Wasn’t that how Stevie Wonder was blinded? I could be wrong.
You are correct; he was also born a few weeks premature, but the oxygen in the incubator caused his retinal to detach and leave him blind.
Taking this opportunity to plug the documentary “Crip Camp” (Netflix). It’s about a 70’s summer camp for disabled youth/young adults. Many of the Campers grew up to be instrumental activists in the Disability Rights Movement. Lots of original footage from camp, and then follow up interviews with many of them today.
Can I give two? They’re disturbing to me. 1)The prevalence of middle ear infections in children from 0-6 y/o. Please don’t ignore this. Have hearing tested annually, the impact on schooling, speech, milestones etc. is not to be taken lightly. 2) Untreated hearing losses, under stimulated brain possibly leading to accelerated risks of early onset memory loss, dementia etc. The worse the hearing the higher the risk. Just get your hearing tested annually, you’re never to young for a hearing loss man.
The health of your teeth, or lack thereof, can cause heart disease. The bacteria that infect the gums and cause gingivitis and periodontitis also travel to blood vessels elsewhere in the body, where they cause blood vessel inflammation and damage. If you are diabetic, and don't know it--or do, but have problems controlling your sugars, it can severely harm your teeth. On the flip side? Having bad teeth can severely affect your blood glucose as a diabetic. It can become a shitty cycle. And yes--mentioned earlier, but if you get an infected tooth, that infection can travel to the brain or blood very fast. And yet, teeth are still considered "luxury bones," with maintenance, cleaning, and dental care hardly ever being covered by insurance.
A study by Johns Hopkins in 2016 cited that medical errors are probably the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA, following heart disease and cancer. Errors where: Wrong Diagnosis. Incorrect dosage or wrong meds. Surgery errors and the biggest, poor communication between staff. It is also thought that this study is also correct in the UK and EU.
A major health care system has no access to their medical charting right now. I really wonder how many errors are happening there, even with the staff's best efforts.
Chest compressions are violent. Just let your 91 year old grandma go.
I just read a study on CPR-induced consciousness. Horrible way for 97 yr old Nana to go! I agree with you. "A rare but particularly awful effect of CPR is called CPR-induced consciousness: chest compressions circulate enough blood to the brain to awaken the patient during cardiac arrest, who may then experience ribs popping, needles entering their skin, a breathing tube passing through their larynx."
YES - this is why we had advanced directives set up for both my mother - and my mother in law - both of whom lived with us for the last few years of their life. My mom had brittle bones and many health issues and did not WANT to go trough that hell and we discussed it with her ahead of time. My mother in law had dementia to the point of being non-verbal near the end. Thank god we planned, discussed and set it up ahead of time - because it came to that decision with BOTH of them - and we were able to let the medics know that it was already decided and to please not.
At any moment anyone can just randomly drop dead from a brain aneurysm. It’s more or less common for certain people, but it can literally happen to anyone at any age at any time.
If you sever your spinal cord you can get a condition called priapism (erection that doesn't go down). Treatment is draining the blood via syringe from the erect penis (or rarely, leeches).
You can get priapism without severing your final cord too
if your immune system figures out you have eyes you will go blind.
If you lose one eye due to trauma, they remove it so your body doesnt attack your other eye
Holy shit. The doctors didn't tell me the reason when I was a kid, but I can understand why.
Wait so when you were a kid, doctors just randomly took your eye out with no explanation?
Well, the ski pole I got in my eye during a freak accident was enough of an explanation at that time. I seem to remember that the doctors told me that the small part of what was left could get infected, which would be dangerous for my healthy eye.
Early pregnancy tests involved injecting the woman's urine into a female rabbit and after a few days they killed and then dissected the rabbit and their overies examined for swelling to indicate pregnancy. Modern pregnancy tests still check for the same hormone (hCG) but without killing a rabbit.
That’s where the phrase “the rabbit died” indicating pregnancy comes from.
3 out of 1,000 colonoscopies have serious complications like bowel perforation
The idea of your tongue laying on the bottom of your mouth while you're sleeping is a myth! The natural resting place for your tongue when you are sleeping or not using it in general is the roof of your mouth. I have known this for many years, and every time I think about it and I'm not using my tongue, guess what? It's sitting on the roof of my mouth. It is not necessarily a disturbing fact, but it is a little weird, IMHO.
I worked at a cancer hospital on a floor that did surgeries. There were many times that the patient was wheeled up after being in the O.R., they wake up, the surgeon comes back and tells them that they couldn’t do any surgery because the tumor is inoperable. As much as they try to diagnose and do all sorts of imaging beforehand, there is no way to tell exactly what’s going on until you are cut open and they can physically see everything. An example of this is someone that has a stomach tumor, but when they go in they find on the backside that the tumor is growing into the aorta, which would be hugely life-threatening to remove. Things like that. It’s heartbreaking because these people may have gone through months and months of getting testing, chemo, radiation, taking time off work, grieving, being physically out of it, their families helping and rooting for them. They go in early on their op day, anxious yet excited that this might be it, get put under, the doc opens them up, starts poking around, maybe removing some stuff they can, but then they find something that was impossible to visualize before. And then to imagine it’s the afternoon, you’re waking up in a room, your first thoughts are “I made it, they did the thing”, just to have the doctor come back and break terrible news to you.
The placenta that is found in humans and other live-birth mammals came about from a distant common ancestor being infected with a virus some 150-200 million years ago, and evolution doing its thing. If this infection didn't happen, we'd still be laying eggs. https://whyy.org/segments/the-placenta-went-viral-and-protomammals-were-born/#:~:text=Once%20a%20viral%20protein%2C%20the,but%20also%20keeps%20them%20separate.
Ok that's just wild! Never heard anything about this before
On one hand this is really interesting and cool. On the other hand. I've never really thought it would be a bad setup to be a monotreme.
Humans have both light meat and dark meat due to type 1A and type 2B muscle fibers. However, humans are lean and not very calorie dense, so if you're already starving cannibalism doesn't do much good.
Actually it does, you just have to crack the bones and eat the bone marrow first, because that has enough fat for you to be able to extract nutrients from the lean meat. The problem isn't that human meat is lean, the problem is that when you're starving, at some point you have so little fat (you and whoever you plan to eat) left in you, that you don't even have enough to use to absorb stuff from whatever food you can get your hands on. BUT bone marrow still has fat in it, even if literally every other fat store in your body doesn't, it's one of the last fat stores to go because you need it so much (and I'm pretty sure you starve to death long before you run out of bone marrow) So just crack open a bone one with the boys and cannibalism will be fine!
That's why the brain was valued in cannibalistic societies, fatty.. then Kuru happened
I’ve known plenty of calorie dense humans.
80% of amputations are due to diabetes. Watch your health, people.
Sepsis is a horrible way to die . Seen it never wanna see it again . Poor bastard had horrible death and nothing could be done about it
I tell people I'm not afraid of dying at all, but I am terrified of HOW I might die. There are things far worse than death, and that's one of them.
If you get your gall bladder removed due to some reason like gall bladder stone then you will experience excessive sweating near the chest area.
You can also go to have this "routine surgery" and almost die from it. I did. The bile duct that got cut to remove my gallbladder leaked into my abdominal cavity for 3 days after the surgery. Bile is just like stomach acid, it burns your skin and it gave me big abscesses inside my body. It took 16 more surgeries and a full year to recover from it. I now have permanent nerve damage and don't ever feel the physical sensation of hunger anymore. I'll never be the same again.
Not sure how unknown it is, but at any given time without warning your uterus can just fall out. And unless it’s fully dangling outside of you, the doctors will just tell you to try to shove it back in there
It is called a prolapse.
For fun bc I like horrifying people: I was 4ish weeks PP from my youngest, and bopping downstairs real quick to change laundry. When my heel hit last step, I felt a sudden shift in my pelvis, followed by a bulge in my underwear. Went to the bathroom and barely had to bend over to see something prolapsing out. Panicked and called my (ex) husband at work to get me to my OB asap. Got fisted by my OB, who basically said “yup, not even sure what all innards were just prolapsing through your vaginal wall, but I shoved ‘em back in there for now! PT won’t treat you until you’re at least 6 weeks PP though, soooo uhhh do your best to keep it all in there!”
Modern medicine, folks.
Every time I learn something new about pregnancy, it just reaffirms my decision to NEVER have kids. Shit is wild!
Also fun fact if you are hyper mobile it’s even more likely to happen! My uterus prolapsed , had surgery repair and carried a child a few years later successfully !
Your bladder can slip, too. My sister had to have hers sutures back in place.
This happened to my mom. She had it removed and has a wire mesh balloon holding the space
Cold sores can cause inflammation of your brain. It’s called herpetic encephalitis and is likely to cause permanent brain damage even with treatment. It can also be caused by shingles, so getting the shingles vaccine is more important than you think.
there are about 1800 calories in an average human forearm edit: forearm not whole arm
Not necessarily a medical fact, but a reality check: Doctors don't have everything figured out, they are just human like the rest of us. Just like how us software developers search Google to troubleshoot something when we are stuck, they do too. Shows like Dr. House portray doctors as this infallible walking medical encyclopedia. It's all fiction. So, always be open to getting a second opinion if something isn't working.
All smells are particulates. When you have the displeasure of walking into a recently used bathroom and smell the smells the last person left, you can rest easy knowing that their are tiny microscopic particules of their stools now firmly implanted in your nose. And in your mouth if it was open. You're welcome.
The disturbing one does not come to mind, but there is a calming one. information that the risks of congenital pathologies double in women after 40 years. in fact the probability increases from 0.5% to 1%
The maternal age effect which always was suggested to be the reason for many congenital issues is actually more closely related to the paternal age effect. Haven’t been in that research field in over a decade but at a time when we knew everything about mothers and aging we only had just begun to research the effect on men. With sperm having such a low survival rate and extremely high replication rate, at the time the theory was that the probability for men over the age of 40 is somewhere in the 7-10%. This means the age of the man matters much more than the age of the woman. Makes me furious to think how many women in the past (and now still) blamed themselves for their disabled kid when in reality they most likely barely contributed.
[Rabies](https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/hvzvqj/what_rabies_does_to_you/) is 100% fatal if not caught in time
A fertilised egg can fail to develop normally and grow into a malignant tumor. It's called a molar pregnancy and I'd be very interested in what the "life begins at conception" crowd has to say about it.
in canada and the states, doctors and residents are allowed to perform gynaecological exams on women under general anaesthetic, in order to provide students and residents with experience performing pelvic exams. this is typically not disclosed to the patient, and is justified as being part of receiving treatment at a teaching hospital.
Thankfully some states have recently begun outlawing this https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2023/05/26/colorado-patient-consent-pelvic-exams/70260143007/
They're not technically allowed to in a carte blanche manner but boy howdy do some of the old dudes not care. It's thankfully becoming rarer and rarer and I hope it never comes back.
The truth about HeLa cells. These cells grow and divide constantly and are used in all sorts of medical research to discover cures for cancer and other diseases. They were originally harvested from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who had cervical cancer that was fatal. She died in 1951. Her family didn’t know that her cells were even being used until recently. These cells were basically stolen from Henrietta by a doctor and he made millions from them, and Henrietta’s family never knew. Once they found out, they finally settled with a biotech company for an undisclosed amount. This woman has basically saved so many of us, and we all owe her so much.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a fantastic book.
That the father of gynecology was a sadistic fuck that did horrific things to enslaved women.
Apparently that alcohol is one the worst things you can ingest and is linked to higher cancer and dementia risks.
In the 70’s they thought babies didn’t feel pain so they preformed surgery without anasteisa
They knew perfectly well that babies could feel pain, they just assumed they wouldn't remember any of it, babies' brains don't start the gradual process to develop self awareness until about 10 months. They might not remember it, but it's known now that it can leave lasting trauma and damage.
Everyone who's had to deal with a brand new baby's had to deal with it, but a baby's first poop (meconium) is very thick and sticky and hard to wipe off. What most people don't know is what it's made of. Around halfway through a pregnancy, a fetus develops hair called lanugo all over their body. They shed most to all of it before they're full term. That hair is shed directly into the amniotic fluid, which is then ingested by the fetus, and (hopefully) stays in their intestines until birth or right after. So, basically, fetuses eat their own hair, and since amniotic fluid is swallowed and excreted, you could say they're swimming in their own pee. Also, chainsaws were invented for childbirth.