At times, local and global events seem to suggest humanity is going backward. However, 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 that our understanding of the human body and medicine has already evolved lightyears from where it was a few hundred years ago. 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!
To reinforce this point, let's check out an online thread where folks have been sharing the wildest medical facts they know. You never know when they might come in handy!
#1
Vaccines dont cause autism.
Image credits: AphroditeExurge
#2
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.
Image credits: NoSwimmers45
#3
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.
Image credits: GuitarEvening8674
#4
Your stomach gets a new lining every few days to prevent it from digesting itself.
Image credits: Swimming_Treat3818
#5
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.
Image credits: LegalFox9
#6
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.
Image credits: PublicProfanities
#7
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.
Image credits: Ludwig_Vista2
#8
Pneumothorax (collapsed lung) can just like...happen. if you sneeze or cough or just breathe wrong, your lung can"nope" and collapse.
Image credits: cat_prophecy
#9
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. ♻️.
Image credits: Traveling_mustang
#10
If a man has fallen, and gets a b**er, do not move him. It’s a sign of spinal injury.
Image credits: MidniteOG
#11
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.
Image credits: mysticdragonwolf89
#12
Newborn girls can have [vaginal bleeding] 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.
Image credits: efox02
#13
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.
Image credits: garrettj100
#14
The female fetus has developed every egg they will ever ovulate before they are born.
Image credits: ChanSungJung
#15
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.
#16
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!
Image credits: NecroJoe
#17
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.
Image credits: trizer81
#18
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.
Image credits: katasoupie
#19
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.
Image credits: Junior_Significance9
#20
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.
#21
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.
Image credits: hillbilly-man
#22
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]
Image credits: lizlemonista
#23
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.
Image credits: Fluffy_Momma_C
#24
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.
#25
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.
#26
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.
Image credits: Halospite
#27
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.
Image credits: AnnoyedOwlbear
#28
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.
#29
If you have a rib removed (say for a surgery), the younger you are the more likely that rib is to grow back.
Image credits: kiwidale
#30
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.
Image credits: mck1llguddy
