46 Medical Facts So Unusual Most People Never Learn Them

* 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.

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”.

Alexthegreatbelgian:

Paracetamol and acetaminophen are both generics of the same molecule, but are named differently because different labs used a different way to describe the molecule.
N-acetyl aminophenol is the US
Para-acetyl-amino-phenol globally

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.

Outrageous_Setting41:

People also used to pour the pee on the ground near an anthill. If the ants love your pee, you’ve got the beetus.

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.

Anon:

May I ask what it's used for in end of life care?

Hikerius:

Reducing secretions I believe.

atxviapgh:

Can confirm as a hospice nurse.

Not super obscure but a couple years ago I learned that LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) patients can live in sustained V Tach (irregular heartbeat) 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.

autumnfrostfire:

Not obscure but I learned that when an LVAD patient codes, the first thing to do is check to make sure it’s still plugged in and on.

The word stupid has medical origins in what we now call catatonia, previously called stupidite. It is why we use the word stupor.

Humans are one of the few animals that need vitamin C to live... Just us, a few primates and Guinea pigs.

Wohowudothat:

And holy cow do the guinea pigs love their little vitamin C tablets.

Anon:

Now I know why chimps keep taking my pills.

potato-keeper:

To throw at the guinea pigs?

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.

zelman:

Unfortunately, ethanol is no longer the preferred treatment. Fomepizole ruined all the fun.

QueenMargaery_:

Come work at a poor rural hospital so fomepizole isn’t on formulary and we still make ethanol drips! BAC titrated to 0.1!

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.

throwawayzder:

“Because he was 23 and unknown, the Institut Pasteur did not even acknowledge receipt of his dissertation.
Duchesne served a one-year internship at Val-de-Grâce before he was appointed a 2nd class Major of Medicine in the 2nd Regiment de Hussards de Senlis. In 1901, he married Rosa Lassalas from Cannes. She died 2 years later of tuberculosis. In 1904, Duchesne also contracted a serious chest disease, probably tuberculosis. Three years later, he was discharged from the army and sent to a sanatorium in Amélie-les-Bains. He passed away on 12 April 1912, at age 37.”
Tragic.

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.

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.

honeyismybunny:

Oh tell me more. Do you have to stick it deep like a COVID swab? I’m so intrigued.

OP:

Deep like a swab, and cephalaud. Let it rest for a moment. A moist swab is easier to tolerate.

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.

ipseum:

Another interesting fact is the full latin name of the plant atropa belladonna comes from the understanding the plant was also highly toxic. Its common name was deadly nightshade. Atropos is one of the three fates in Greek mythology and was thought to determine the means of death for mortals severing the thread of their life with her shears. So the plant is named for both it's toxic and cosmetic uses and the name atropine is derived from the Greek mythological figure.

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.

sassiveaggressive:

Would Charles Bonnet be similar to this?

irishspice:

CB Syndrome happens to people who have lost some of their vision. The brain fills in what is missing and is sometimes quite creative about it. I'm a Blind Rehab Specialist and always asked my clients if they see things that aren't there. They won't tell anyone because they think they are going crazy. I tell clients that if it makes no sound, or seems out of place, it's just their brain being silly. The brain can get quite creative and show them animals/pets that aren't real. One lady saw a party in her living room that she was rather sad that she hadn't been invited to.

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.

Radioactive_Doomer:

Didn't stop that one med student.

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.

2old2care:

The Josephinum is astonishing. I discovered it quite by accident while making a medical history film in Vienna. It is a must-visit for anyone interested in medical history.

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.

minecraftmedic:

Close!
It was actually cattle spontaneously haemorrhaging or doing so after being castrated.
Clover and many other plants contain coumarin. A fungus in the spoiled hay metabolised the coumarin into dicoumarol, which the cows then ate.
Hence the WARF - arin for W.A.R.F + dicoumarin.
The first commercial use of warfarin was as rodenticide, hence why you think of rodents.

Cotard's Delusion - a psychiatric condition where the patient beliefs that they are [passed away], missing organs, or immortal.

tarracecar:

Saw a patient like this. He believed his brain had leaked out of his ears and that he was already passed away.
Very nice patient, very psychotic though.

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.

beck33ers:

Also done partly because they didn’t think babies could feel pain.

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.

Anon:

In my undergrad they put out a call for a research assistant. I had a telephone interview with an elderly lady and got the job. I was confused that we didn’t meet on campus.
I was told to show up to a home address in an area I had never visited in town. I grew up working class.
I show up to this beautiful house on a hill. So much art. There were original group of seven paintings. I met Mrs. Best, the wife of Henry Best. He was the son of Charles Best. She tells me her husband had died a few years ago and she never cleaned out his study because it was too emotional for her.
For weeks I was tasked with creating a catalogue of her husbands books. I went through so many papers that were his fathers. Henry was a historian. And then one day the photographs. I believe I handled some originals from the famous photographs of Best Banting and the dog. Some outtakes when the dog was giving them trouble posing. I’ll never forget that.
Mrs. Best even invited me to lunch with her sometimes. She made fancy foods I had never tasted. She told me about Henry and their life together. She took the time to teach me etiquette. She always asked me about my life. She was such a lovely person. I’ll never forget those weeks I spent in her house.

Furosemide (often called a "water pill" - used to reduce excess fluid buildup and treat high blood pressure) 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 (a stiff, fibrous, and delicate structure in the inner ear). Paraphrasing here but a fun fact I stumbled across within a comparative animal physiology textbook.

apothecarynow:

Bonus lasix fact-
Have you ever heard someone say they got to 'pee like a racehorse'. That's because trainers would give furosemide to race horses before races to prevent exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhaging.