Friday, October 27, 2006 

Strange Medical Cases & Stuff

Where the hell to start??? There are so many strange medical cases that I think are just absolutely fascinating. I will probably write a few post about some of them. My little brother started working at Barnes & Noble and can buy me books at 50% off... I have a long list of books for him to buy me at the moment, I don't know if I can get all of them read. The book that I am currently reading is called "Stiff"... It is about cadavers... and yes I will most defanitley write about it when I am done. Did you know they used dead bodies in biological warfare during the dark ages? They used to throw the bodies of soldiers that died of the plague over castle walls to infect the people inside. How weird would it be to have been a person inside a castle during a months long battle, and to see dead bodies being catapulted into the castle square! Anyway, that is not what I am writing about today.

I suppose I will start with a couple strange medical facts. like the fact that "In Nepal, Cow Dung is used for medicinal purposes. The Nepalese, believing that Dung has antiseptic properties, often pack a woman's vagina with it after she has given birth. This practice is thought to be responsible for the high incidence of tetanus among new mothers in Nepal". Sounds appealing right? Well in certain time periods and places, I will use ancient Egypt as an example, Camel shit was packed into the vagina for birth control purposes. And to think, I would probably throw a fit if I were to have to wear a condom. So I am guessing that oral sex is not a popular choice among men in places where animal shit is shoved up in there. Just a thought. Also, in ancient China, doctors were forbidden in the name of honor to see their female patients naked. To circumvent this prohibition, doctors on house calls brought with them a small ivory carving of a woman's naked body. This carving was passed into the curtained bedchamber of the ailing woman along with instructions on how to mark the troubled organs. The statue was then handed out through the curtains and the doctor made his Diagnosis on the basis of the markings. Not as interesting as the whole shit into the vagina concept, but its not easy to top that one.

This may or may not top the shitty vagina trivia, but I guarantee you that you will think about this the next time you are thinking about having sex with someone. So we had some free time in class a few weeks ago, and so our teacher brought up a conversation about HIV. Here is a quote from emedicine.com "According to a report by researchers Norman Hearst and Stephen Hulley in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the odds of a heterosexual becoming infected with AIDS after having penile-vaginal intercourse with someone in a non-high-risk group (IV users, gay men) without a condom are one in 5 million". No, this is not the mind blowing part yet, but still keep in mind that your odds of being murdered are 1 in 11,000 and the odds of being struck by lightnining are 1 in 600,000. Now lets talk about hermaphrodites. here is a quote from the Intersex Society of North America.... "Here’s what we do know: If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life." Wow.... That means that you are more likely to have sex with someone that was born a mangirl or a ladyman, than you are to contract HIV. Even better, it is believed that 1 in every 45,000 births is a true hermaphrodite... meaning a person that has functional male and female genetalia.

Anyway, some medical diseases..... At some point in time, a person may feel that a part of himself or herself is missing. Well if you were to be diagnosed with Cotard's Syndrome, this might be literal to you. People suffering from Cotard's syndrome believe that they are literally missing pieces of their body, some even believe that they are dead. They smell the rotting of their own flesh and sometimes believe that they can feel the maggots crawling around on their dead flesh. How fun.

Everyone at some point in life has been so tired that he or she felt like they could just die. What if you really did die? There are about 28 known families in the world, in which members have a 50% chance of develpoing a disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia. One of the books I have now is titled "The Family that Never Sleeps". This is a disease that I learned of about two years ago, and since then I have read almost every article written about it. Though I have not started the book yet, I don't want to wait to write about it. Twenty-eight families..... Let us assume that there are also families in poor places such as Africa, that can not be diagnosed with it... That is still a fucking rare disease. It was discovered by an Italian doctor that married into a family that suffered from the condition. He was able to document it centuries back in her family. All the way to the first insane asylum created in Europe. It takes anywhere from 14 to 18 months from the onset of symptoms, for it to cause death. It takes so long, because the periods of "sleep" last only a matter of seconds in the final stage. This literally drives the inflicted person crazy. No known sleeping agents known to man, have an effect. Here is an excerpt from a NBC:Dateline transcript. "Tapes recorded his semi-awake state. His eyes rarely stay closed. Then after 6 months, he begins miming in his half-dreams - combing his hair, buttoning his shirt. Though he may look conscious, he isn't. He's lost in a passageway between sleep and the wakeful world. In time, he finds it difficult to walk. Insomnia caused his body to shut down and he died, exhausted, at 52." I shoudn't complain about my lack of sleep due to school and work. By the way, five of the known twenty-eight families, live here in the United States.

Another rare case known as FOP (Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva), is when tissues in the body begin to turn into bone. Ouch. The areas that are most commonly effected are the neck, shoulders, and back. A patients connective tissue in his/her knees, hips, elbows can also ossify, causing the limbs to be permanently locked into place. No one knows what causes this, and cutting away at the formed bone only causes more bone to grow. Pictures are always fun.











Early symptons are malformed toes.... like this


Gross.

Something that has been making headlines in the news lately is a condition known as sexsomnia. It of course, is a person that unknowingly has sex in his or her sleep. How fucking cool would that be! Imagine being a sleep therapist, and having some sexsomnia patients staying the night at your clinic......

6:36 PM | |

Friday, October 20, 2006 

The Face of Medicine

I wrote this long post out of boredom. It talks about the history of medicine, and I think it is very interesting. I even discuss how the modern vibrator came to be... Let me know what you think.

I do not know about everyone else, but I always had the idea that modern medicine was up to par with star trek when I was a child. I never thought there was a magical device that you can wave over someone and miraculously heal their wounds, but still, I thought that a doctor knew everything and that medical procedures were extremely advanced. Many procedures are, but if you actually go to a hospital and watch some of the basic procedures they do, or if you read medical stories.... It is almost like we are still in the dark ages. We as a race have come a long way though. The man who is referred to as the father of surgery was an Indian (of the slurpee variety, not the casino kind) by the name of Sushruta. He lived in the sixth century BC, and his writings are the oldest known text concerning surgery. He is also the considered the father of plastic and cosmetic surgery, so for all you women who want or have fake tits... This is the man to thank. His methods of fixing noses (rhinoplasty) are still used today, practically unchanged. Back then, one method of punishment for certain crimes, was to have one's nose cut off. Sushruta would take some skin from the forehead, and use it to build a person a new nose. Considering that fatality rates for any form of surgery were almost 85% until the late 1860's early 1870's... This is amazing.

Joseph Lister (where the name Listerine comes from) was the first to have the idea that perhaps the surgical instruments used should be clean, and this was not until the late 1860's, after the civil war. An example of what surgery was like before Lister came along..... A proper way to sharpen a scalpel was taught to all medical students. This technique involved lifting your foot and sharpening the scalpel against the leather of your shoe. I would think that I do not even need to explain how bad that is, and the high rate of post op infections that occurred as a result. The high fatality rate is why many of your grandparents were terrified of hospitals. They grew up hearing stories about their parents and hospitals. Today most of us just do not like hospitals, imagine what it was like to know that going to the hospital was the equivalent of a death sentence. There was a surgeon before Lister named Ignaz Semmelweis that introduced the concept of hand washing before surgery or delivering a baby. He discovered that if a doctor were to wash his hands before delivering a baby, the mother had a less likely chance of becoming infected and dying of puerperal fever. This is why most people were delivered by a midwife in these times. Imagine giving birth back then... You have a doctor that was likely poking around on a cadaver (dead body) or picking his nose, maybe he was even wiping his ass with his bare hand. Imagine the problems that can arise with his unwashed hands up in your business. Keep in mind that latex gloves were not even around until the 1950's. Some of our parents could have been delivered by ungloved doctors. Common sense now a days, right? Well the doctors at this time said that he was crazy. They did not want to accept that it was their fault that so many women were dying during child birth. Semmelweis was stripped of his medical license and was then locked away in an insane asylum where he died of the very disease he was trying to abolish by simply washing hands. How fucking insane is that?

Most people have heard the name of Florence Nightingale, but many have no clue as to what she did. Other than being the reason that all hospitals are kept clean, she came up with the idea to wash bandages... Thats right. Imagine that you were a wounded soldier during the civil war. You are placed on a hospital bed next to a soldier that just died of a gangrene infection he developed on his bandaged wound. With a shortage of fresh bandages and no knowledge of the importance of a clean bandage, your doctor takes the bandage from the dead soldier and immediately uses it to wrap your wound. You now have that soldiers gangrene, blood, pus, and everything else wrapped tightly around your open wound. Need I say more?

I could go on and on... The evolution of lobotomies and other brain surgeries, is very interesting. But I am just going to end this with one last story for the women out there.

Now a days, most women have no problem admitting that they own one or ten vibrators. But do you know where the vibrator came from? It has its roots in medicine... Back then when a woman would do something improper, such as talk back to her husband or show an over eagerness for sex, she would be diagnosed with hysteria. The cure for this was for a woman to go to the doctor's office and have him massage her genitals until she reached what was called "hysterical paroxysm." Hysteria of this form was considered a real disorder until the 1940's. As one can imagine, women would go every week to the doctor's office to have this "medical procedure" performed. This spread quickly and soon women everywhere were claiming to suffer from hysteria. Obviously this became a labor intensive job for the doctors to perform this procedure, so people came up with the idea of creating a device that shot jets of water onto the woman's genitals, causing her to reach this "hysterical paroxysm." This turned out to be messy though, so a British doctor in the 1880's created the first vibrator. It became a permanent fixture in many doctor's offices. Here is the picture.



Ask your Grandmother if she ever went to the doctor for "hysteria".

I love history and I love medicine. My grandfather moved to Texas in a covered wagon in 1901, and before his death he was flying around the country in a jumbo jet plane. I think the people of my generation will live to see a vaccine for HIV, a cure for parkinson's disease, alzheimers, and perhaps cancer. I think we will see humankind set foot on Mars. What technological and medical advancement will our children live to see?

6:25 PM | |