10 Medical fun facts I learned in my degree
I have been studying medicine for 6 years and while its usually kind of boring and technical you sometimes get some silly bits of information that you cant believe you didnt know before, these are some of my favourite ones.I will keep the explanations short and light but you are welcome to ask me for more information if you want to!
​
1. Redheads vs anesthesia
There are many factors that go into calculating the amount of anesthesia someone will need, most are related to height, weight and age, so it has always been funny to me to see anesthesiologists stock up on drugs when they have to operate on someone who is a natural redhead.
This is due to a genetic mutation that makes them more sensitive to pain and more resistant to these drugs.
​
2.Ligaments
If you have ever been told by an Italian fuckboy that he was going to play football professionally but broke his crossed ligament 10 years ago, you might be surprised to find out that he has a point.
Since some ligaments are not vascularised they cannot heal, the crossed ligament is, unfortunately, one of these, and even after physiotherapy your knee will never be the same.
​
3. Color of poop
Have you ever wondered why your poop is brown? Or maybe just assumed that it’s that way because of different colours in food that mix to give brown? Well if you assumed this you would be wrong.
The brown colour is given by the liver, most specifically by bilirubin, which starts off as a yellowish-greenish colour and as it passes through the digestive tube turns into a brown colour. There are some foods that can turn the colour darker, as well as your consumption of iron which will make it greener.
Last year, while on a trip to Egypt some people in my tourist group started pooping white. They thought it was because of the probiotics. That’s impossible. It was hepatitis A. Still don’t understand how they thought they were shitting yogurt.
​
4. The kidneys are where?
Every time it’s cold outside my mum and my grandma insist that I should cover well my lower back to ‘protect the kidneys’, and to be honest I feel like we as a society think the kidneys are there, they are not, they are protected by your last pair of ribs, so they are actually so much higher.
Bonus fun fact: when they give you a kidney transplant they leave in the old one (unless it’s infected or has cancer) just because the surgical risk is lower that way
​
5. Fruits are liars
When we talk about vitamins, what are you picturing? Because I get my mum telling me to drink the orange juice before the vitamins go away. And while oranges have a lot of vitamin C and are great for you, if what you really want is to be stocked up on vitamins and minerals you should cook yourself some liver.
Actually most vitamins are in meat, eggs and fish, only vitamins A and C can be found in citrus fruits, green leaf vegetables and carrots.
This is not to say fruit is bad for you, please eat fruit! It’s a great way to get fiber, water and antioxidants in your diet, and every type of fruit has its own special superpower
​
6.Fat or fat?
Sumo wrestlers are considered to be in excellent shape, with strong muscles, high flexibility and excellent cardiovascular resistance, but you would never guess this at first glance.
This is because the fat in our bodies can be stored in 2 different ways that make all the difference when it comes to our health : peripheral fat is stored just under the skin, over our muscles and relatively far away from our vital organs, while visceral fat is, well, visceral, it accumulates in the cavities, surrounding your organs and increasing the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
Sumo wrestlers have a very strict routine and diet, to make sure that the fat they have stored is away from their organs.
As another bonus fact I will let you know there is a type of ‘fat’ called brown fat that burns calories to produce heat for the body. It is especially prevalent in newborns but stays with us throughout our lives in some spots of our bodies and lately has been used in obesity treatments.
​
7. Smoking is bad (surprise, surprise)
We have heard it all our lives, but with the pictures on the boxes, the ads and at the same time it being so normalised, we have been successfully unsensitised from the damage.
Truth is, smoking rots you from the inside out, not only your lungs are affected but your whole body starts turning black and just decomposes, you loose fingers and body parts slowly but surely. This won’t happen in 5 years, but it will happen in 40 and I can assure you it’s truly horrifying
Another thing is that tobacco never fully leaves your body, when you open a thorax during surgery you can see black stains on the lungs, more or less depending on how much you smoke, and when you cut into the lung the whole room fills with a strong tobacco smell. Don’t think vapers are safe, I remember the first time I saw the lungs of someone who vaped regularly, they were full of blisters, you know when you burn your finger while cooking and a blister forms? Like that, but on the lungs.
​
8. Stress=more girls being born
Let’s start with some basics first: the gender of the baby is determined by the sperm. There is female and male sperm, all swimming at full speed to the egg trying to fertilise it, it has recently been discovered that the egg then has a choice on what sperm can fertilise it and which can’t but that’s a bit more complicated so let’s keep it simple.
In general male sperm is faster but female sperm is stronger, which means that if the egg is in the perfect spot when the sperm arrives, a male will be more likely to fertilise it, otherwise male sperm dies and female sperm can afford to stand around and wait/look for the egg.
What happens when factors like war, famine, or pandemics hit? Stress increases, and with that the conditions on the uterus become more hostile since our bodies think that it’s not the right time to have kids. This results in none of the male sperm making it to the egg and only the strongest (female) sperm doing so. This mechanism has been theorised to be the reason why people born during wartimes live longer, but it’s not something that has been confirmed.
​
9. Vampires are real
Well kind of, porphyria cutanea tarda is a rare disorder caused by a lack of a specific enzyme causing an abnormally high level of porphyrins. These porphyrins are transported through the body leading to symptoms such as photosensitivity, painful, blistering skin lesions that develop on sun-exposed skin and deformities on teeth and bones.
Historians believe that the image of the classical vampire as we know it today was developed because of this disease, today we know more about the illness and depending on the cases these people can live a relatively normal life, so if you see someone with pointy teeth today it might just be a style choice
​
10. Humans have stripes
Our bodies are covered in invisible stripes, they determine where moles and birthmarks appear. We have these stripes since birth and the patterns vary from person to person like a fingerprint.
What’s interesting is that these patterns don’t match any nerves or vessels, they were created by the migration of our skin cells in the womb and some skin conditions can make them visible