10 posts tagged “medicine”
He suffered a heart attack, and upon his recovery doctors found he had no pulse. He has returned to all his usual activities and seems to have no ill effects.
There is no real explanation for this situation; some believe that if the blood pressure and blood vessel valves are strong enough, the circulatory system can simply push blood through the body without the assistance of the heart.
He has run a barefoot half marathon in the Arctic Circle and swam 80 meters under the Arctic ice wearing just a swimsuit.
Normally hypothermia and frostbite set in fairly quickly in cold temperatures and can quickly turn fatal, but this man suffers no ill effects. The best explanation is that his brain does not trigger the usual response to extreme cold, or that he is able to control his body's response.
Certain Buddhist monks are also able to regulate their bodies' temperature via meditation.
This rare and complicated procedure is not for the squeamish. A canine tooth is removed (usually from the patient, but in this case from the man's son), A special cylinder is inserted into the tooth, and this is inserted into the eye socket.
Who comes up with these things?
Note: Image after the link may be disturbing
A patient needed a new upper jaw (yikes!) so they harvested his own stem cells from his fatty tissue, then implanted a jaw-shaped scaffold so that he would grow a new jawbone in his own abdomen. Then they harvested the organ nine months later and installed it into his head.
According to the scientists overseeing the patient, the stem cells not only gave rise to bone, but also to blood vessels and other cell types.
Of course, using materials from your own body greatly reduce the chances of organ rejection, the leading cause of complications after transplantation. Using stem cells is more flexible than using pre-existing bone, even from the patient's own body.
Stem cells scare some people still - the whole Playing God argument. Do be aware that this same reasoning was actually used when the telephone was invented, because some said that the gift of the human voice should not be reduced to mere electric impulses in wires.
Many of these "foreigners" are agents for good; we exist in a happy symbiosis. Some are actually needed just to keep us healthy. In fact, according to Esquire, the high incidence of certain diseases of the developed world such as asthma, allergies, and cancer may be due to the fact that we don't have these microbial friends.
Recent research has found correlations between such unlikely pairs as:
- Helicobacter pylori, which can cause stomach ulcers, may decrease the likelihood of developing asthma as well as developing esophageal cancer
- Helminths, a kind of worm that has been with humans since the Stone Age, may boost the immune system
- A variant of bird flu can cause a kind obesity in both poultry and humans that strangely includes a low cholesterol score
- A particular strain of Escherichia coli isolated in 1917 prevents colitis. Other strains of E. coli wreak havoc on the gastrointestinal system as food poisoning victims can attest
- Certain kinds of bacteria that produce lactic acid (think yogurt) can bind and neutralize the toxins found in charred meat (large amounts of these toxins are linked to stomach cancers)
- Toxoplasma gondii reproduces in cats - but for humans who live in close contact can be infected, causing neurological and behavioral changes - i.e. crazy cat lady syndrome
Scientific American has an interesting (long) article up about using tools from neuroscience to find connections with religious experiences. One experiment involved scanning the brains of nuns while they recalled intense spiritual experiences to see which parts of the brain "lit up". Turns out it's the temporal lobes (near the ears).
Most interestingly, there is evidence (from at least 1892) that makes a link between religious experiences and certain forms of epilepsy that may involve misfirings of the brain in the same regions. People with this form of epilepsy often report intense spiritual experiences.
Depending on how religious you are (and how dualistic you are), you may not believe that the experience of God can be reduced to simple firings (or even misfirings) of electricity in the brain. On the other hand, it is interesting to know that there might be a special place in the brain dedicated to experiencing God.
I'm not a religious person myself, so I'd be interested to know what the "God spot" in the brain does for people who haven't had an intense spiritual experience. Can it register strong reactions to nature, to music, or art, or philosophy?
However it is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek guide to, well, things that might kill you. It's organized by symptom, which is handy when deciding whether you should get that rash looked at. Or if your back pain is just from sleeping funny or if it is ankylosing spondylitis (look it up)
One of the stranger medical conditions is fetus in fetu. Identical twins form when a single zygote splits into two and develops into two fetuses. Extremely rarely, the body of one twin will become incorporated into the other. Together they continue to develop, although the enveloped twin generally has no head, and may lack several other important organs or body parts. It is a parasite. The twin may remain in the other well into life, but if the parasitic twin uses too many resources both can die.
Two notable cases presented in the past decade or so. The first was Alamjan Nematlaev, a boy from Kazakhstan with stomach problems. The hospital intended to remove a cyst, but ended up removing a rather well-developed parasitic twin that had hair, genitals, bones, and nails. His parents told him his stomach problem was from eating bad fruit - psychologically it can be a traumatic event, plus Alamjan was only seven.
The other case was Sanju Bhagat from India. He had always had a large stomach since birth - he looked almost pregnant. Again, doctors intended to remove a large tumor, but instead had to remove a parasitic twin that included hair, nails, and long bones. Sanju was in his thirties. The video is an (overdramatic) news story about Sanju's case. [note: this video is not really for the squeamish.]
As long as all the organs are oriented in the same way (situs inversus totalis), the person can live a regular life, although there is a slight risk of heart or circulation problems. Organ transplants can pose problems, since it's unlikely to find donors who have the same condition.
More specifically, the heart can exhibit either dextrocardia (literally, right-side heart) or levocardia (left-side heart). If the heart is not oriented the same way as the other internal organs, serious heart problems almost always occur.
Another rare condition is situs ambiguus, which is just as it sounds. It can involve malformed organs, or solitary misaligned or reversed organs - the stomach and spleen seem to be especially prone to this.
Fun fact: Donny Osmond has situs inversus totalis.
Squirrels can slow their heart rate from the usual 300 beats/minute to about 5 beats/minute when hibernating. Their body temperature falls dramatically and their oxygen use decrease to 1/50 of their active state. They can also go between the two states without any problems.
Implications and applications of humans being able to regulate body temperature, oxygen consumption, and heart rate are numerous in both military, civilian, and especially medical arenas.
Buddhists monks (and the occasional regular guy!) are sometimes known to be able to regulate these body processes, although science has yet to crack the case of exactly how to do it.
