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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 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!
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#1
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.
Whenever you are reading "facts" online, keep in mind that not everything you come across is accurate, reliable, or presented in its full context. Especially on social media—where content is largely unregulated. It is often up to the community itself to check the validity of claims. (Together with our readers, we found inaccuracies in this thread, too.) This is exactly why there's so much misinformation!
According to one of the most quoted studies on the subject, half of Americans subscribe to medical conspiracy theories, with more than one-third of people thinking that the Food and Drug Administration is deliberately keeping natural cures for cancer off the market due to the pressure of drug companies.
Iris Gorfinkel, M.D. is a general practitioner, medical researcher, and the founder of PrimeHealth Family Practice and Clinical Research. She told Bored Panda, "A juicy conspiracy leads to more clicks, shares, and engagement, especially when it's bad news. So the content keeps showing up because of its popularity (and that's across all platforms, including X, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.)—we're more prone to keeping our eyes glued to the screen."
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#2
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.
#3
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.
"Of course, seeing more of what we like and what we believe in makes us dig in our heels all the more, rather than exposes us to new perspectives that could actually expand our minds," Gorfinkel said.
"This can eventually become a really dangerous echo chamber where the things that show up not just reinforce what we believe in, but tell us that we are correct to believe in them, whether or not they're true. That is probably my biggest fear around the internet," the doctor added.
#4
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.
#5
Pneumothorax (collapsed lung) can just like...happen. if you sneeze or cough or just breathe wrong, your lung can"nope" and collapse.
So what do we do with these algorithms that were built to exploit us? According to Gorfinkel, arguably the best thing to do is kind of listen to our gut and then... consider the opposite!
"I like to consider how the content makes me feel. If I see something that really triggers a strong feeling — anger, anxiety, fear, even glee or self-righteousness — there is a chance it's simply not true. It's a bit of a warning sign. The biggest predictor of believing in something is actually wanting it to be true."
#6
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.
#7
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.
Another good tip is to be aware of who’s posting the information. Ask yourself: Does this person or company have something to gain from the publication, whether financially, socially, or politically?
"I guess what makes me optimistic are classes that teach emotional regulation because it's really important to recognize and label emotions and be able to articulate how something makes me feel so that I can then recognize potential myths or disinformation."
We need all the tools we can get to protect ourselves from being manipulated, "whether it's an individual, a company, or an AI-driven bot," the doctor said.
#9
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.
#10
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. ♻️.
#12
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.
#13
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.
#14
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!
#15
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]
#16
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.
#17
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.
#18
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 [p**p] 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 [p**p] transplant, while promising, is still very much in its "research" phase and should not be thought of as some kind of simple miracle cure.
#19
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.
#20
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.
#21
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.
#22
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.
#23
If you have a rib removed (say for a surgery), the younger you are the more likely that rib is to grow back.
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