62 Weird Medical Facts That Turned Out To Be True

Fatal Familial Insomnia. In this genetic disease you literally lose the ability to sleep until you die.

It starts with just normal sleeplessness but gets worse until your brain physically can't enter deep sleep anymore. You end up hallucinating and having dementia like symptoms before passing away within a few months to a year. It is caused by prions which are misfolded proteins kind of like Mad Cow Disease but for humans.

It is super rare and only runs in about 70 families worldwide but it is honestly the scariest medical thing I have ever read about.

ynvoid:

Oh man, as someone who has had insomnia from birth and only gets about 10- 20 hours sleep a week. This is my worst nightmare. The insomnia is literally destroying me just not as fast as FFI.

Extremely rarely during chest compressions a patient can regain consciousness, only to lose consciousness as soon as the compressions stop. It's due to good perfusion from h**h quality compressions.

So imagine you're doing CPR, your patient starts clawing at your arms and trying to verbalize but you have no choice but to keep going.

May I never encounter this situation.

WranglerBrief8039:

Unfortunately, I’ve been the one on the chest for this. The sheer terror on the woman’s face was something else. Family finally let her go after 40 minutes.

The kids of identical twins are genetically half siblings.

wibblywobbly420:

If identical boys and identical girls both have kids together, their kids are genetically full siblings.

Lots of people have extra bits inside them, or sometime missing bits, that they never know about and do them no harm until they have medical treatment that spots the 'error'. FYI I have two renal arteries because i am a greedy git.

Your Fallopian tubes aren’t fixed in place and may swap sides and attach to the corresponding ovary.

cherrycocoakoala:

True, plus they're not physically attached to the ovary at all, they float near it and the ovary shoots out an egg into the gap, the egg is shot into the tube. People with one fallopian tube can still get pregnant from either ovary, the tube can move between them each month.

If your veins are calcified enough, they will crunch like terracotta tubes being punctured when you get blood drawn.
No one prepares you for crunchy veins...

pinupcthulhu:

I'm going to regret asking this, but ... What causes calcified veins?? 

haw35ome:

The obvious like h**h calcium, but also (and more commonly) h**h phosphorus in your blood. Unfortunately it’s in everything, but dark colored sodas & dairy have h**h levels of it. Healthy people can go about their lives just fine, just don’t have a diet of pure coke and cheese or something lol
Source: me, a dialysis patient - we need to watch out for this accumulating in our blood system (among many other levels, like potassium)

Theres a nerve that loops thru your hip and connects to your genitals. Its in a really safe spot but on the rare chance it gets damaged the best way to reach it is to cut your buttcheek off and then sew it back on.
The pudendal nerve. There are only 5 surgeon in all of north america that perform the surgery. So if you need your buttcheeks cut off and sewn back on you gottta wait a while and travel to do it. Good luck traveling back to where ya came from with that cheek.

Shinjitsu-:

We are so used to modern medicine we forget, our bodies are built to NOT be opened or come apart. The way humans have found ways to access the deepest parts of us is nuts. Like there's a procedure to reach the base of the brain that cuts the top mandible clean off and splits the face bone in half, and they keep track of it all and reattach it after. 

Your mind will "fill in the blanks" if it's missing sensory input. For example, if you lose your hearing, your brain might tell you that you hear music. My grandmother lost her hearing, but was always asking if we were playing organ music. Nope. Her brain just decided that silence was icky, and switched over to the traditional church hymns station.

Nobody really knows how anesthesia works. Only that it works.

After a traumatic event you can lower the chance of PTSD by playing Tetris.

When you get a kidney transplant, they leave the old one in there and stick the new one in your pelvis. There are people walking around with three or four kidneys.

Jennacyde153:

My colleague’s dad just got 2 new ones so now he has 4. My kid only has 1 kidney but it’s as big as an adult kidney.

Your body can survive being cooled to 56.7°F (13.7°C), the lowest recorded human body temp, and make a near full recovery (Anna Bågenholm's 1999 skiing accident case). Fun fact, doctors literally can't declare someone [passed away] from hypothermia until they're warmed to normal temp first.

FullMoonMooon:

You’re more likely to survive a drowning related cardiac arrest if it happens in cold water compared to warmer water. Submerging your face in water stimulates the mammalian diving reflex, which lowers your heart rate, and decreases your oxygen requirement —> less hypoxic brain and heart damage.
This is also useful for anxiety attacks. If you’re able to dunk your face in a bucket of cold water, it can help “reset” your hyperventilation. This can also be used to revert SVT (supraventricular tachycardia)

Redheads need more anesthesia and Novocain.

The external lining of the placenta (the part that makes the contact with the mother's uterus) is a single giant cell with surface area of more than 10 m².

It's a syncytium (a cell formed by the fusion of cells) formed by a protein that was incorporated in the mammalian genome from a retrovirus.

So 2 facts for one! Before we are born, we a have a cell big enough to cover a car and it is only possible because one of our ancestors had a viral infection that mutated one of it's reproductive cells!

Pale_Alternative_537:

Is this also the case in other mammals?

no-more-throws:

Yes and no... Wildly enough rats, cats, cows have entirely different synctin proteins from entirely different ancient retroviral infections... It's a magnificent case of convergent evolution.. Early mammals needed mechanisms to keep the embryo and the mother separated while having near seamless but controlled nutrient transfer, and many some half dozen viruses raised hands saying 'say no more bud, I got just the right toolkit!'

Statistically speaking, people on average die more than once.

LogicBalm:

I've casually referred to my father's motorcycle accident as "the first time my dad died". It usually glides through the conversation pretty effortlessly. No one questions it. It happens.

Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) is a medical procedure that uses healthy donor stool to restore a patient's gut microbiome.

Also, being a victim of Total Locked in Syndrome sounds horrifying.

Humans literally glow (biologically), but our eyes can’t see it
Every cell in your body produces energy through chemical reactions involving oxygen. During these reactions, tiny amounts of light are released when excited molecules (especially from free radicals) return to a lower energy state. This phenomenon is called ultraweak visible light emission.
The light is real visible light, not heat or radiation.
It’s about 1,000 times weaker than what human eyes can detect.
Special ultra-sensitive cameras have photographed glowing human bodies in complete darkness.
Why it sounds fake:
We associate glowing with fireflies or sci-fi. But biologically, it’s just chemistry.
Why it’s true:
It’s a measurable byproduct of cellular metabolism and oxidative stress.

Wart magic. Pediatricians would sometimes tell a child they had a magic pen and would draw a circle around the wart and the wart would die. It is believed the power of suggestion worked due to children's strong imagination.

"Sickle Cell" anemia is a condition where your blood cells form a crescent instead of a donut shape. It's a very painful disease and no known universal cure.

But if you have sickle cell, you're immune to malaria.

Most people don’t realize you can still get sun damage through glass. Windows block most UVB, but a lot of UVA gets through, which is the stuff that ages skin and can contribute to skin cancer risk.