
“They’re Not Dead Until They’re Warm”: 30 Medical Facts That Should Come With A Warning Label
Interview With ExpertAt 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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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."
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.
Endometriosis (tissue from the womb) is not cancer. But it can send out cells that spread through your internal organs and grow, stick your guts together or block them, deform your organs and eat holes through them, and spread up to your diaphragm and lungs. Unsurprisingly, this is agonisingly painful.
Something like 1 in 10 women have it. And apparently it's still not worth doing research into.
i_am_voldemort:
My spouse is a gynecologist surgeon. She had a patient with endometriosis in her lungs that caused life-threatening pulmonary issues.
CannibalAnn:
I do medical deep dives regularly as a morbidly curious freak and endometriosis is one of the scariest things I have ever seen. It can grow anywhere. People have had it in their brain and on their skin. And it can go through menses. Awful, scary, terrifying stuff.
And yet women are still told it’s just painful periods and normal….
"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.
Pregnancy can just turn on diseases that you may have never had before.
I developed a thyroid disease and an autoimmune disease during my first pregnancy.... it's been great...
Inwint:
It can also make your eyesight worse, cause cavities and loose teeth, cause or exacerbate bone loss/osteoporosis, make moles or angiomas grow or appear, make subsequent periods heavier, temporarily reduce grey matter in the brain, cause pelvic organ prolapse, cause skeletal structure changes, cause abdominal muscle separation, new-onset diabetes (usually from gestational diabetes), and increase the risk of Alzheimer’s.
The number of side effects, complications, and possible permanent effects of pregnancy would fill a book, yet people still try to pretend it’s a perfectly normal and harmless process and women are just complaining.
I’m even happier with my choice not to have children reading this…
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.
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."
It's impressively hard to close someone's eyes after they die.
Not like on TV.
You press them down, and then they open back up a little. Then you have to press them closed again and press a little harder.
I know. I was bedside when my Dad passed away. If he was still in the room, I bet he had a good chuckle.
Miss him.
This is why they used to put coins on the eyes of the deceased. To hold them closed and to hide the fact of they drifted back open.
Your stomach gets a new lining every few days to prevent it from digesting itself.
Weight loss surgery cures diabetes.
I’m talking about type 2, **diabeetus** diabetes. And not from the weight loss, it happens almost immediately. Somehow it perturbs the gut flora and that’s what causes diabetes, maybe?
The Nobel prize in 2006 was given to a research doctor theorized it was bacteria, not stomach acid & stress that caused ulcers. Unable to get funding for research, he drank an *H. Pilori* milk shake and gave himself ulcers. (He was Australian because of course he was.)
Fecal transplants have been known to cure Crohn’s disease, but have also been found to transmit clinical depression from donor to recipient.
All this is to say, we don’t know **f**k-all** about the gut.
Current research into gut micro biome and fibromyalgia too https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32116215/
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.
Pneumothorax (collapsed lung) can just like...happen. if you sneeze or cough or just breathe wrong, your lung can"nope" and collapse.
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.
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.
If a man has fallen, and gets a b**er, do not move him. It’s a sign of spinal injury.
gets exactly what, you dumb censorship morrons?! It looks like pretty important fact you hide it away!
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.
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. ♻️.
The female fetus has developed every egg they will ever ovulate before they are born.
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.
I once read a story (I don't remember it where it was from, either it was on reddit or here, also I don't remember the whole story) where a mom found a tiny amount of blood in her daughter's diaper (or something related to it) and almost killed her husband in the hospital only aka the daughter's father, thinking he might had done something to her.
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.
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.
If we were built to actually digest them, we could get our daily 2000 calories by eating the full-mouth sets of teeth from 55 adult humans. Crunch crunch.
TamLux
Ma! They're posting weird s**t on the internet again!
Recently, I found out that the human jaw muscles are powerful enough to crush teeth. It's limited only by the strength of our own teeth.
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]
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.
I don't think number 2 is accurate. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm about to turn 39 and my partner and I are trying for a baby and I have not heard that you're the most fertile before menopause. Doctor's have told me I was most fertile at 14. And even if I DO get pregnant, whether I can maintain the pregnancy is another risk since I'm old and also my eggs are old, so higher chance of there being a genetic issue (which results in miscarriage).
A lot of bone breaks don't hurt that much. I work in radiology and while we don't see the nasty breaks you do in trauma (which often REALLY hurt), we see a lot of broken toes, fingers, metacarpals and metatarsals. Those breaks are often not easy to distinguish from muscle or tendon strain without imaging and the patient is acting completely normal. I used to think breaking anything would have someone on the floor in agony but a lot of them are like "yeah it hurts when I bend it."
If you want nightmare fuel: sometimes your spine can spontaneously break under its own weight. This is called a compression fracture.
Can confirm, both times a broke something (foot and arm, a few years apart). The arm didn't hurt that bad except when I tried to use it, but it was impossible to twist my hand. The foot was bruised and swollen but I still had to wait to go to the doctor because "you're not crying so it's not broken, you just twisted it, put ice on it!"
Prion diseases. Basically a protein, which is the basic building block for your body, goes rogue. This leads to a chain reaction where other proteins around it are misshaped and basic body functions break down. When it attacks the brain it causes irreversible brain damage and death. There’s no way to target a rogue protein. In diseases like Mad Cow disease it’s acquired by consuming meat. But it can also just happen randomly.
This is honestly one of the most terrifying rabbitholes you can research imho. Prions cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease which is incurable and its only treatment is providing palliative care; on average, people die within 12 months after their formal diagnosis. You know what's even more terrifying, though? Depending on the variant of CJD and route of exposure, incubation periods range from a few months to *decades* to "unknown". As unlikely as it is, it's not impossible to develop vCJD in 2025 because you ate the wrong burger in the 90s.
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.
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.
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.
What makes measles such a dangerous disease is that it causes a sort of amnesia of the immune system that can last as long as a year or two.
That and it kills a good percentage of the people it infects. Particularly in non-Europeans
Something around 2% of the world's population hears "The Hum." Those excessively loud and thumping sound systems in cars can be borderline torturous
Enjoy the rabbit hole.
I hear it. Sometimes two or three times a year, sometimes not for a year or so. The amount of people that can't/have never heard it and say "Oh, it's tinnitus/road works/traffic noise/a helicopter" etd! No It's Not! Completely different!
Humans can live with one lung, the remaining one will expand and partially fill the rest of the chest cavity, which can lead to cardiac distress. It's not the most pleasant existence, but people have made it up to 30 years like that.
If you have a rib removed (say for a surgery), the younger you are the more likely that rib is to grow back.
I feel like some of these things should really be checked as being fact before they are posted or you spread misinformation. Ive noticed this a lot in these types of posts. The items are not always correct.
You're right of course, but they do get checked, in the comments section, by fellow Pandas
Load More Replies...Until relatively recently (into the 1980s!) babies who were operated on got little to no pain relief because medical science didn’t know what the effect on tiny humans would be. I repeat: babies were operated on without anesthetics. This information was brought to you by someone who had eyesurgery as a 1 year old in the 1970s.
They did not believe babies felt pain or had pain receptors yet. Kinda how they act like our uterus’s don’t.
Load More Replies...Okay, so we can regrow our thyroid and regrow our rib and we also have stripes? Humans are so much cooler than I thought.
And "stripes" are not always literally stripes. There are several types of prints, some of them are more "stripey" than others.
Load More Replies...I feel like some of these things should really be checked as being fact before they are posted or you spread misinformation. Ive noticed this a lot in these types of posts. The items are not always correct.
You're right of course, but they do get checked, in the comments section, by fellow Pandas
Load More Replies...Until relatively recently (into the 1980s!) babies who were operated on got little to no pain relief because medical science didn’t know what the effect on tiny humans would be. I repeat: babies were operated on without anesthetics. This information was brought to you by someone who had eyesurgery as a 1 year old in the 1970s.
They did not believe babies felt pain or had pain receptors yet. Kinda how they act like our uterus’s don’t.
Load More Replies...Okay, so we can regrow our thyroid and regrow our rib and we also have stripes? Humans are so much cooler than I thought.
And "stripes" are not always literally stripes. There are several types of prints, some of them are more "stripey" than others.
Load More Replies...