50 People Share The Most Bone-Chilling Medical Facts That Might Give You Goosebumps

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 first doctor to suggest hand washing before surgery was laughed at repeatedly by his colleagues.

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.

We got to modern medicine by grave robbing, crime, and accidents. it wasn't always legal to be a doctor.

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.

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 s****y 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.

Chest compressions are violent. Just let your 91 year old grandma go.

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 were: 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.

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.

That your body fights off 10,000 events that would cause cancer daily.

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.

Chainsaws were originally invented for childbirth.

Vibrators were invented because doctors were manually massaging women to hysterical paroxysm (orgasm) to cure their “hysteria” and they got too lazy to do it by hand.

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.

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 f*****s

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.

There is no cure for rabies unless you catch it immediately and get injections. Once symptoms show it is too late and the person will die .

80% of amputations are due to diabetes.

Watch your health, people.

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.

When you die, the bacteria that used to help digest your food, now digest you….

That doctors don’t know everything and you can go years without getting a diagnosis while being in unspeakable pain. I’m going through this right now.

19 months of this. I can’t handle another few more. How can something that hurts this bad and feel like a broken rib not show up or be known after almost two years of tests? At the end of my rope here.

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.