Our body is an incredible machine, but it's also a bit of a mystery. Despite spending our entire lives in this amazing, complex vessel, we often know surprisingly little about it. However, while it might be thrilling to discover fun facts about the human body, there are also some unsettling truths you might prefer to ignore.
When u/Beneficial_Cry2061 asked on Reddit, "What is a disturbing medical fact that not many people know?" the responses started pouring in. People shared some truly unsettling facts that might just make you squirm. Dive in and discover these strange realities of the bodies we live in.
#1
The truth about HeLa cells. These cells grow and divide constantly and are used in all sorts of medical research to discover cures for cancer and other diseases. They were originally harvested from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who had cervical cancer that was fatal. She died in 1951. Her family didn’t know that her cells were even being used until recently. These cells were basically stolen from Henrietta by a doctor and he made millions from them, and Henrietta’s family never knew. Once they found out, they finally settled with a biotech company for an undisclosed amount. This woman has basically saved so many of us, and we all owe her so much.
Image credits: KweenBee1986
#2
The first doctor to suggest hand washing before surgery was laughed at repeatedly by his colleagues.
Image credits: thedoc617
#3
We got to modern medicine by grave robbing, crime, and accidents. it wasn't always legal to be a doctor.
Image credits: AvocadoPizzaCat
#4
A scary number of people wind up with vertebral artery dissections and strokes from chiropractic cervical manipulations. How do I know? I've seen several perfectly healthy women in the prime of their lives as organ harvests in my OR.
Image credits: AlternativeSolid8310
#5
The health of your teeth, or lack thereof, can cause heart disease. The bacteria that infect the gums and cause gingivitis and periodontitis also travel to blood vessels elsewhere in the body, where they cause blood vessel inflammation and damage.
If you are diabetic, and don't know it--or do, but have problems controlling your sugars, it can severely harm your teeth. On the flip side? Having bad teeth can severely affect your blood glucose as a diabetic. It can become a s****y cycle.
And yes--mentioned earlier, but if you get an infected tooth, that infection can travel to the brain or blood very fast.
And yet, teeth are still considered "luxury bones," with maintenance, cleaning, and dental care hardly ever being covered by insurance.
Image credits: Pinkatron2000
#6
A fertilised egg can fail to develop normally and grow into a malignant tumor. It's called a molar pregnancy and I'd be very interested in what the "life begins at conception" crowd has to say about it.
#7
A study by Johns Hopkins in 2016 cited that medical errors are probably the 3rd leading cause of death in the USA, following heart disease and cancer.
Errors were: Wrong Diagnosis. Incorrect dosage or wrong meds. Surgery errors and the biggest, poor communication between staff.
It is also thought that this study is also correct in the UK and EU.
Image credits: LegalAdviceHope
#8
That your body fights off 10,000 events that would cause cancer daily.
Image credits: ScaredVacation33
#9
Not necessarily a medical fact, but a reality check: Doctors don't have everything figured out, they are just human like the rest of us. Just like how us software developers search Google to troubleshoot something when we are stuck, they do too. Shows like Dr. House portray doctors as this infallible walking medical encyclopedia. It's all fiction. So, always be open to getting a second opinion if something isn't working.
#10
The man who developed the pap smear did so with the help of his wife, who received pap smears almost daily for 21 years.
>Volunteering as an experimental subject: For 21 years, Mary allowed her husband to sample her cervical cells and vaginal fluids almost daily, which he would then smear on glass slides and examine under a microscope.
Image credits: PerAsperaAdInfiri
#11
There are so many wild things living in the microbiome of a human's skin. Demodex are a great example; little mites that live near human hair follicles. They look horrific and they feed off of sebum, sweat, dead skin etc.
Many things are localized too; the things living in your eyelash follicles are not the same as the ones living on your elbows. We're a whole universe, and even our skin is colonized by bizarre little f*****s
Edit; a lovely little quote I found online, about Demodex
"When you sleep, the mites come out of your skin’s pores, mate, then go back into your skin to lay eggs."
Sexy.
Image credits: no0neiv
#12
Cat scratch fever is real, and can be deadly. I know someone who spent 2 weeks in hospital from it and it was his cat.
Image credits: lespaulstrat2
#13
Chest compressions are violent. Just let your 91 year old grandma go.
Image credits: Shomer_Effin_Shabbas
#14
80% of amputations are due to diabetes.
Watch your health, people.
Image credits: 314159265358979326
#15
Chainsaws were originally invented for childbirth.
Vibrators were invented because doctors were manually massaging women to hysterical paroxysm (orgasm) to cure their “hysteria” and they got too lazy to do it by hand.
Image credits: NoDanaOnlyZuuI
#16
There is no cure for rabies unless you catch it immediately and get injections. Once symptoms show it is too late and the person will die .
Image credits: ChrisShapedObject
#17
When you die, the bacteria that used to help digest your food, now digest you….
Image credits: EssKayAarr
#18
That your immune system can go rogue and just randomly start eating things you need to stay alive when there's no foreign invaders to fight against.
Image credits: anon
#19
Cold sores can cause inflammation of your brain. It’s called herpetic encephalitis and is likely to cause permanent brain damage even with treatment. It can also be caused by shingles, so getting the shingles vaccine is more important than you think.
Image credits: UnapologeticAberrant
#20
That doctors don’t know everything and you can go years without getting a diagnosis while being in unspeakable pain. I’m going through this right now.
19 months of this. I can’t handle another few more. How can something that hurts this bad and feel like a broken rib not show up or be known after almost two years of tests? At the end of my rope here.
#21
Can I give two? They’re disturbing to me.
1)The prevalence of middle ear infections in children from 0-6 y/o.
Please don’t ignore this. Have hearing tested annually, the impact on schooling, speech, milestones etc. is not to be taken lightly.
2) Untreated hearing losses, under stimulated brain possibly leading to accelerated risks of early onset memory loss, dementia etc. The worse the hearing the higher the risk. Just get your hearing tested annually, you’re never to young for a hearing loss man.
#22
At any moment anyone can just randomly drop dead from a brain aneurysm. It’s more or less common for certain people, but it can literally happen to anyone at any age at any time.
Image credits: ShadoOwEd
#23
When you have surgery and your organs have to be scooped out to access something else, they don’t put them back where they were. They just kinda put it all back in and our organs just shift back to where they were. I learned this fact when I went to stand up after having a csection.
Image credits: hotmama1230
#24
Not sure how unknown it is, but at any given time without warning your uterus can just fall out. And unless it’s fully dangling outside of you, the doctors will just tell you to try to shove it back in there.
Image credits: cherinoia
#25
Oxygen poisoning is a thing. Too much O2 in your body can kill you.
But don't worry, you won't die from breathing too hard. It's mostly an issue for divers and other people who breathe pressurized breathing gases.
Image credits: 24benson
#26
ADHD symptoms are heavily influenced by estrogen levels, and yet ADHD was not studied in girls/women until 2017.
#27
Everyone who's had to deal with a brand new baby's had to deal with it, but a baby's first poop (meconium) is very thick and sticky and hard to wipe off. What most people don't know is what it's made of.
Around halfway through a pregnancy, a fetus develops hair called lanugo all over their body. They shed most to all of it before they're full term. That hair is shed directly into the amniotic fluid, which is then ingested by the fetus, and (hopefully) stays in their intestines until birth or right after.
So, basically, fetuses eat their own hair, and since amniotic fluid is swallowed and excreted, you could say they're swimming in their own pee.
Also, chainsaws were invented for childbirth.
#28
Not a human example (probably), but sometimes cows, goats and other animals get pregnant but instead of giving birth to a normal lamb/kid/calf it gives birth to an *"amorphous globosus"*, a spherical mass of flesh with an outer layer of skin with hair or fur, and the inside a jumbled mess of guts and tissues and sometimes teeth. They never have brains or spinal cords though, so they're always stillborn and nonviable.
Image credits: Heroic-Forger
#29
Your tonsils can turn against you and hurt your immune system. I had mine taken out at age 21 after an abscess nearly killed me.
#30
Some hospitals allow medical students to practice on patients who are under anesthesia. Without the patient's knowledge/active consent.
It is completely f****d up. They hide technical consent in overly broad terminology in the papers you sign when you go in for an operation.
They argue that they do it this way because it is hard to get volunteers for students to practice very invasive internal exams.
#31
The eyelash mite lives mainly on the human eyelash and is an 8 legged parasite that eats skin and oil. They stay hidden in the hair follicles during the day and emerge at night to eat, lay eggs and excrete waste. And that is why you should wash your face in the morning.
Image credits: RandomNameGenFail003
#32
Prions.
Edit- prions are misfolded proteins that cause other proteins to misfold in your body and it causes cell death. They affect the brain and aren't curable. They are also extremely hard to destroy. A few prion diseases are:
Mad Cow Disease
Kuru
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
Fatal Familial Insomnia (nightmare fuel)
Chronic Wasting Disease.
#33
Sepsis is a horrible way to die . Seen it never wanna see it again . Poor bastard had horrible death and nothing could be done about it.
#34
Poop can come out of both ends.
Image credits: anon
#35
When you get a kidney transplant, unless your original kidneys are diseased, they just lEAVE THE OLD ONES IN THERE. OLD DEAD KIDNEYS JUST CHILLING
also- fallopian tubes are not connected to ovaries. they just float in the general direction of the ovaries and do their best to vacuum up eggs as they get popped out (kind of like a pimple bursting) out of ovary pores? so the eggs just get popped wherever and you gotta cross your toes and hope your weird little vacuum tubes are aiming right that day???
Image credits: fleatsd
#36
If your immune system figures out you have eyes you will go blind.
Image credits: Ketil_b
#37
Humans have both light meat and dark meat due to type 1A and type 2B muscle fibers. However, humans are lean and not very calorie dense, so if you're already starving cannibalism doesn't do much good.
Image credits: SailorVenus23
#38
There's a certain part during the cremation process where the meat is perfectly cooked.
#39
In the 70’s they thought babies didn’t feel pain so they preformed surgery without anasteisa.
Image credits: wetlettuce42
#40
In canada and the states, doctors and residents are allowed to perform gynaecological exams on women under general anaesthetic, in order to provide students and residents with experience performing pelvic exams. this is typically not disclosed to the patient, and is justified as being part of receiving treatment at a teaching hospital.
#41
I just learned about SJS, where you get an adverse reaction to a medication by your skin falling off. It happens at seemingly random too, but some medications are more prone to cause it. Fun stuff.
#42
Lots of things we know about resuscitation, trauma surgery, emergency medicine etc, were learned through gruesome vivisective experiments on WWII prisoners of war. Basically, every life saved now was paid for by a PoW tortured to death in a camp.
#43
I think you can get a tooth infection and it spreads to your brain n you go bye bye.
Image credits: CalmLykEhBomb
#44
If you sever your spinal cord you can get a condition called priapism (erection that doesn't go down). Treatment is draining the blood via syringe from the erect penis (or rarely, leeches).
#45
The beginning of birth control was originally an experiment and was wildly irregulated.
Image credits: Newkid92
#46
If the anesthesiologist f****d up you wouldn't know
edit:
since everyone is sharing their story i'll share mines. i was diagnosed with bladder cancer early 2022 with signs i ignored late 2021. between april 2022 - june 2023 i went through 5 surgeries to remove the tumors in my bladder. they kept coming back.
mentally preparing myself for the first trans-urethral resection, pre-op nurse just straight up told me if the anesthesiologist f****d up i wouldn't know..or wouldn't feel anything if s**t hits the fan. what a f****n pep talk huh? hahah.
christmas 2023 i was finally clear. i still go to chemo (doublet therapy?) and see a catheter :( for gemcitabine/docetaxel.
Image credits: airforkjuan
#47
That the father of gynecology was a sadistic f**k that did horrific things to enslaved women.
#48
All smells are particulates. When you have the displeasure of walking into a recently used bathroom and smell the smells the last person left, you can rest easy knowing that their are tiny microscopic particules of their stools now firmly implanted in your nose. And in your mouth if it was open. You're welcome.
#49
The placenta that is found in humans and other live-birth mammals came about from a distant common ancestor being infected with a virus some 150-200 million years ago, and evolution doing its thing. If this infection didn't happen, we'd still be laying eggs.
Image credits: Tired_Lambchop111
#50
The ovaries and fallopian tubes are not connected, so when an egg is released the fallopian tube sucks it up like a straw. Ladies, this also means that any seamen that makes it to the fallopian tubes have an open door into your abdominal cavity.
