We often think of ourselves as more capable than we really are. For example, according to this survey, four in five Americans consider themselves knowledgeable about the human body, but only one in ten knows that O-negative is the universal blood type, and only three in ten could tell the difference between a liver and a kidney. So, to stay grounded and remind each other that there’s always something new to learn, people on the internet have been sharing their favorite obscure medical facts. Here are some of the most fascinating ones!
#1
* The same process that turns food brown when cooked (caramelization, or the ‘Maillard reaction’), also occurs in our blood vessels as body heat causes sugars to bind to cell proteins. We just call it “glycation” instead.
* Shellfish allergies are also triggered by snails and other land-based molluscs. No escargot for you.
* If you are born blind due to lesions in the brain (congenital cortical blindness, rather than lesions in the eye (congenital peripheral blindness)), you apparently can’t become schizophrenic. Zero known cases.
* Microgravity causes bacteria to rapidly become resistant to virtually every known antibiotic currently available (edit: upon exposure, I should clarify). Interplanetary and interstellar travel will resemble the Oregon Trail a lot more than we’d hoped.
* The idea that amputee patients can still feel their lost limb (phantom limb syndrome) is fairly well known even in the public. What I’ve not seen mentioned so much is that somewhere around half of amputees with the syndrome report being able to move their ‘phantom limb’ projections in impossible ways, complete with phantom sensation. Rotating a wrist 360 degrees or bending an elbow backwards.
* There are twins born over a month apart (90 days is the record). Usually when the mother goes into labor prematurely and the doctors were able to stop it, but only after the first child is born.
* Some deaf people with tourettes syndrome involuntarily sign curse words with their hands.
Image source: GeeJo, Natalia Blauth
#2
Hyoscyamine, often used in end of life care, comes from henbane. Henbane wreaths were said to be worn when people crossed the river of styx into the other world after death.
Image source: mariah808, reddit
#3
Humans are one of the few animals that need vitamin C to live….just us, a few primates and Guinea pigs.
Image source: potato-keeper, reddit
#4
The reason the molecule epinephrine/adrenaline has two names is because epi-nephros is Greek for “on kidney”, and ad-renal is Latin for “on kidney”.
Image source: QueenMargaery_, reddit
#5
Achromatopsia is condition characterised by a partial or complete lack of colour vision.
Whooping cough and kennel cough are related conditions as both are caused by the bortadella bacteria.
Valium takes its name from the Latin word ‘vale’ meaning farewell/goodnight.
In the 1890’s in Australia it was common for patients with arthritis to climb inside beached decomposing whales and lie in them for two hours in an attempt to be cured.
The heaviest recorded kidney stone belonged to a Hungarian man. It was 17cm in diameter and weighed 1.12kg.
Lefort’s facial fracture classification system came about by him dropping cannon balls on cadaver heads then boiling them to expose the skulls.
Image source: DorcasTheCat, reddit
#6
You can terminate intractable hiccups by placing a nasopharyngeal swab into the nasopharynx, inducing vagal nerve stimulation. So far I have a >98% success rate.
Edit: I didn’t expect this comment to blow up, so I’ll explain the technique I have used. Nasopharyngeal swab, moistened with sterile water (or equivalent) to reduce the irritation caused by the dry swab, dominant nostril, place it in the nasopharynx and cephalaud (towards the brain), do not spin the swab in the manner required to obtain a sample but leave the swab in place for 5-10 seconds and apply slight pressure ventrally. Patient supine can help, good idea to have a basin ready in case of vomiting. Coach regular breathing as there is a tendency to hold breaths. The time the swab remains in place should be the same duration as the time between hiccups.
Image source: BlanketFortSiege, Curated Lifestyle
#7
Not super obscure but a couple years ago I learned that LVAD patients can live in sustained V Tach for a long time. An LVAD doc was doing a bedside echo and showed me what was going on with a patient that had been airlifted to us— he said, “if this were any other person he’d have died hours ago, but it’s the machine! It’s keeping him alive!” It was the only time I ever saw that man show any emotion at all.
Image source: cocainehydrochloride, brennanrk
#8
Probably not obscure; but-
Atropine comes from the Atropa bella-donna plant. Dilated pupils used to be considered a beautiful thing, so ladies would use an extract from the plant to dilate their pupils. Bella Donna is some foreign language (Italian maybe?) for beautiful girl.
Image source: SapientCorpse, reddit
#9
The treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol. If you drink methylated spirits, the treatment is to get loaded. Methanol is metabolised by the liver into formaldehyde, which we make naturally in small amounts, but in larger amounts is quite harmful. The metabolism of ethanol, the alcohol we actually want to drink, is much more forgiving.
Our liver does both with the same pathway, so if we dilute the methanol in the system by introducing ethanol we’re reducing the amount of formaldehyde we’re producing over time to less harmful levels.
When distilling spirits the first 200 mL or so should be discarded because it’s mostly methanol. However, moonshiners and distillers of old didn’t want to waste anything so would drink it as well, but then treat themselves inadvertently by drinking the rest of their spirits that were mostly ethanol.
Image source: ImGCS3fromETOH, reddit
#10
Warfarin was discovered incidentally after a bunch of mice ate spoiled grain and bled out. It’s derived from a fungus. The University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Fund paid for the original research for it to be developed as an agricultural poison – WARF-arin is an acronym for this group.
Image source: signofthefour, reddit
#11
Alien limb/alien hand syndrome. By far my favorite. Occurs when one hemisphere is disconnected from another but still has functional output to a limb, extremely rare to see unless one is movement d/o with a clutch of CBGD patients. Its quite disconcerting to see patients referring to the ‘evil twin inside them’ with their limb floating in the air in the exam room or grabbing things tightly with no input from the patient.
Image source: cytozine3, Zhongyi Chen
#12
Deaf people with schizophrenia can experience auditory hallucinations as seeing hands signing.
Image source: marahootay, reddit
#13
The mold from which the first antibiotics were harvested were first discovered from a young French med student Ernest Duchesne, noticing that Arab stable boys would keep horse saddles in damp, dark places to encourage mold growth. This reduced the amount and severity of saddle sores. Wrote a paper on it but didn’t receive credit. Several decades later and Fleming makes Penicillin.
Image source: An0nym0usR3dditor, reddit
#14
If you push dexamethasone too fast your patient’s perineum might burn or tingle.
Image source: SpoofedFinger, Mufid Majnun
#15
I don’t know how obscure this is, but Diabetes was diagnosed previously by physicians tasting a patient’s urine, it was positive if it was sweet. That’s where the name comes from, Diabetes Mellitus meaning sweet urine.
On a related note, Diabetes Insipidus is not related to Diabetes Mellitus except in word definition. If DM urine tasted sweet, DI urine tasted bland to diagnosing physicians, and that’s where the name came from, bland urine.
Image source: fudgemental, ranz Christoph Janneck
#16
Cotards Delusion- a psychiatric condition where the patient beliefs that they are dead, missing organs, or immortal.
Image source: doktorketofol
#17
Furosemide being administered causes temporary hearing loss because it’s a potassium channel blocker and potassium is largely responsible for causing the neurons to fire and move the hairs in response to noise within our basilar membrane. Paraphrasing here but a fun fact I stumbled across within a comparative animal physiology textbook.
Image source: tdoodles97
#18
I do a fortnightly poster in the staff toilet at work with five medical/facts listed.
I’ve been doing it for about four years.
It’s my time to shine!
Image source: DorcasTheCat
#19
During heart surgery we drain the patients blood out into a bucket and put it back at the end.
Nobody knows how much heparin you need for cardiopulmonary bypass. People just picked a number in the 60s and we’ve basically stuck with it since.
The original mechanical valves were loud enough to be heard across a room.
Image source: michael_harari
#20
You can tear or dissect your vertebral arteries by sneezing, turning your head or chiropractic manipulation… leading to severe stroke.
Image source: BIGPicture1989
#21
The canal of Schlemm is neither a canal nor a Schlemm.
Image source: DonkeyKong694NE1
#22
Not super obscure, at least in my world:
Cystic fibrosis causes abnormal salt transport. Old adages warned of a child who tasted of salt, that they would not live long – in some ways that’s what a sweat test does.
Surfactant is made from minced infant animal lung. Infasurf (older surfactant) is made from cows. Curosurf (current standard) is made from pigs. My son received infasurf and I told him when he was little that he’s part cow. He would hotly reply that was not true because he was part dog, because he was related to his dog.
The limit to viability is truly what stage the lung are in. As the lungs develop, the primitive sacs that will become alveoli move closer to the vascular bed. Too far away from the vascular bed, it doesn’t matter what you do with the lungs, it’s too far to diffuse and you can’t oxygenate or ventilate. Viability will not go below that stage until the are artificial placentas.
Bronchopulmonary dysplasia is incredibly similar to COPD in adults. Modern ventilation strategies are essentially forcing the baby to pursed lip breathe because babies are c**p at taking directions lol
Pulmonary vein stenosis and pulmonary hypertension in BPD patients are sequelae of not treating their lungs properly. Treatment for BPD is really all about preventing those complications.
Image source: sapphireminds
#23
Mummies are rare because Europeans ate a ton of them as medical cannibalism.
If you take all your blood vessels out and line them up, they’d be long enough to stretch 2.5 around the planet.
Also you’d die.
Image source: Lereas
#24
Until relatively recently, lots of pediatric anesthesia was done simply by paralyzing the infant with no other anesthetic on board. This was because the mortality from anesthesia was so high it wasn’t worth the risk.
This means that the poor kid would be awake, aware, and feel all the pain, just unable to move.
Image source: AbbaZabba85
#25
The word stupid has medical origins in what we now call catatonia, previously called stupidite. It is why we use the word stupor.
Image source: SpacecadetDOc
#26
Precedex stands for Precedes Extubation – read this one on here recently.
Image source: anon
#27
A unit of insulin, as opposed to a more specific measurement like milligram/milliliter etc, started because insulin was originally drived from animal pancreases. A given batch would be administered to a rabbit, with a ‘unit’ being the amount required to incite a seizure, which would tell how much insulin was in a particular batch. This originally created a problem as when insulin production was exported from Canada to England the size of the rabbits tested were different between the two countries, with English hares much larger than Canadian rabbits, resulting in too much insulin being given to patients.
Image source: Gorfang
#28
I’m 5 years out of residency and still to this day the only thing that truly freaked me out was learning about Teratomas (dermoid cysts at birth) in Pathology. Basically benign tumors of developed tissues hair eyes etc.
want to go down a gross out rabbit hole of google images? You’re welcome.
Image source: Caybabyq
#29
Diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus were named based on how they made the urine *taste*.
Image source: Cola_Doc
#30
Amniotic fluid is primarily the baby’s urine.
Image source: This_is_fine0_0
#31
The Roman Empire developed screws that tighten with right-handed supination because the supination musculature in the forearm is stronger than pronation.
Image source: cafecitoshalom
#32
The stethoscope was invented by a French doctor who thought it was awkward to lay his head on the breasts of females to listen to their heart.
Image source: KapiteinSmikkelBeer
#33
There is still a narrow medical use for leeches and blood letting. Also, ECT is still the most effective treatment for depression.
Image source: ThatB0yAintR1ght
#34
This is more anatomy than straight up medical but my favorite nerve is the recurrent laryngeal nerve as it’s a clear example of biological evolution as it’s anatomically coming from the same origin as the equivalent in fish/shark Gills
And in giraffes the nerve goes all the way down the neck and back up to the vocal cords. It’s just a cool nerve..
Image source: TheGreaterBrochanter
#35
Nobody really has a clue how general anaesthesia works, we know you are not awake during it and you don’t remember anything afterwards.
Image source: anon
#36
Propfol is suspended in a emulsion of soybean oil and egg lecithin. You know what else is an emulsion of eggs and oil? Mayonnaise.
Image source: MedicatedMayonnaise
#37
Valproic acid was discovered as an antiepileptic agent because it was used as a “metabolically inert” solvent that researchers used to test other agents as potential antiepileptics. They were titrating the other agents of interest to essentially homeopathic dosages, but they were still demonstrating antiepileptic effects…until they realized it was the solvent (valproic acid) that was the MVP.
Image source: slowcookedribs
#38
The physician who co-discovered insulin was a Canadian physician named Frederick Banting. In 1922, he was the first physician who ever treated DKA.
Incidentally, he was also an orthopedic surgeon and that’s also likely the last time an orthopedic surgeon attempted to treat diabetes.
Image source: wanna_be_doc
#39
Norepinephrine is just epinephrine with no R group.
Image source: Damn_Dog_Inappropes
#40
The Austrian Emperor commissioned Venetian anatomists to create extremely accurate wax models of the human bodies in various stages of dissection for medical study. He did this because the dissecting a human, would result in condemnation. However, all Venetian’s had been excommunicated and condemned after the 4th crusade, so it was too late for them.
The wax models are on display at the Josephinum Medical Museum in Vienna. I Saw them in 2003 and still one of my favorite museums.
Image source: Jimdandy941
#41
As a rule of thumb, colorful chemo has to go into a central line while colorless chemo can go into a peripheral line.
It’s because the colorful chemos come mostly from plants, are lipophilic and will cause significant problems if they extravasate. The colorless ones are mostly smaller synthetic molecules that are hydrophilic and can’t do as much damage if they end up in the wrong tissues.
Image source: Rzztmass
#42
Yersinia pestis suppresses the immune system similarly to HIV-1. They both target the CCR5 receptor. Therefore, the delta32 CCR5 gene mutation confers resistance to both HIV-1 and Plague.
Image source: dawnbandit
#43
The fact that some people do not have the genetic makeup to smell asparagus in urine.
Image source: anon
#44
Decidual cast is when you have a period where the entire uterine lining comes out at once looking like you’ve had a painful miscarriage when in fact it’s just the inside of uterus having a spring cleaning event.
Image source: Jodster96
#45
Earphones increase earwax production.
Image source: syedaaj
#46
Propranolol blocks endogenous melatonin production.
Image source: mikewise
