Category: Medicine

By Anupum Pant

The brain is a powerful piece of mushy mass and it works in mysterious ways. Not until very recently, thanks to a woman suffering from an unfortunate condition, we have figured a new way the human brain pays games.

A woman named Milena Channing could see like everybody else. But then, at the age of 29 she suffered from a stroke that damaged her visual cortex – the part of a person’s brain which is responsible for processing whatever information the eyes send it.

When she woke up in the hospital, everything had gone dark. Very slowly she began realizing that she could see ghostly figures in the air. Then when she heard the rain falling, she could actually see the rain, and nothing else. Then she noticed she could see the steam rising from a hot cup of coffee, and other things which moved, but nothing else.

Doctors figured that these things she was seeing were only hallucination. It was only later when she visited a group of neuroscientists in Canada, she found out what really was happening. They explained that only the part of her brain which was responsible for detecting motion was getting fed information from the eye and she was able to see just the motion – as if stationary things didn’t exist!

The sad part is that the part of her brain which is responsible to process slightly complex imagery like faces was damaged. So she can’t see faces. But she can see her daughter move around. Call it a curse, or a blessing.

via [NPR]

By Anupum Pant

Did you know? The first contact lenses were something you wouldn’t want to wear – They were made of glass, covered the whole eye (yes, even the white part) and were as thick an average slice of bread! So, you couldn’t wear it for more than a couple of hours.

Adolf Fick, born in Germany began researching the contact spectacle in Zurich. He used rabbits and human corpses to conduct his studies.

By Anupum Pant

Yes, plants can grow inside human bodies. Here’s what happened about 4 years back. And it’s just one of such many instances where plants have been found growing in human bodies.

A 75-year-old man from Massachusetts, Ron Sveden had been experiencing short breath for a couple of months. And then his condition started deteriorating. He started coughing incessantly one day. That was when he knew it was something serious. 911 was called and he was rushed to the hospital.

Doctors took the X-ray. They found that one of his lungs had collapsed and a tiny spot was seen on the X-ray. Sveden was now sure that he had cancer. He just waited for the doctors to speak.

The test for cancer turned out to be negative. Doctors instead found a pea plant growing from his lungs. A pea must have gone down the wrong hole some time, doctors theorized. Apparently the warm and moist conditions inside the lung had made it a perfect place for the pea plant to grow.

After a fairly simple surgery the 1.25 cm pea plant was removed from his lung and Sveden was sent back home.

By Anupum Pant

WHO classifies cellphones as devices that could possibly cause cancer. But, then it says the same about coffee and pickled vegetables. The whole world has come to believe that cellphone radiations do cause cancer – a gross interpretation of WHO’s statement. It says that it is a “possible carcinogen”. WHO, or no one else for that matter knows for sure that there is a clear link between cellphones and cancer. In fact, the evidence also tilts on the side that says there’s no clear link.

Clearly, the number of people using cellphones exploded in the last couple of years. However, the number of people reporting brain tumour – which they say is caused by cellphone radiation – has shown no spikes in recent years. If that isn’t convincing enough…

The radiation from a cellphone is more or less the same as the radiation that comes from several other devices like your wi-fi router or bluetooth. It is a non-ionising radiation. That means it is nothing similar to X-rays or cosmic rays – non-ionising radiation doesn’t damage your DNA. Or, no clear link has been established yet that says so.

Healthcare triage makes some really convincing points about the same. So the good news is, you don’t have to throw away your cellphone.

By Anupum Pant

Mouth breathing is the root cause of several other problems. Worsening of sinus blockages is probably the best known among them all. Besides that when you are not breathing through your nose, you are not giving a chance for the air to move through your mucous membrane which produces nitric oxide in the body – Lack of which is a bad news for your heart and blood vessels. And the list goes on.

But the other unusual and lesser known problem associated with mouth breathing is this. It can make you look uglier! Which as the name suggests, is an ugly facial feature – long and narrow face. And then, if their tonsils swell due to this, their jaws start to adjust into a weird position in order to gather the maximum amount of oxygen into their bodies. This happens mostly to kids when they start breathing through their mouth early in life. However, it isn’t only limited to kids. Also, it’s easier to fix this on kids.

So, if your kids uses his/her mouth to breathe, it is a very good idea to correct it right away.

Kids who end up being chronic mouth-breathers are likely to have something called the long face syndrome.

via [Link]

By Anupum Pant

Just like the colour of our skin is determined by the presence of melanin in it, the colour of your eye is also determined by the same thing. The presence of melanin makes your eyes black or brown coloured and the absence of it makes them blue. So, every one on the inside is white and has blue eyes.

Now, for most people the colour of their eye is not a problem. But for people who have heterochromia – a difference in colouration, usually of the iris but also of hair or skin – it’s a different story. Who’d want to have their eyes of different colours. They sure would like to get this difference corrected.

Strōma Medical, a company from California though of exactly that. In the year 2011 they announced a device that could help patients get their irregular eye colouration corrected. Changing brown eye colour to blue is really a breeze with their method. However, changing from green to blue is tougher. Theoretically, green can be changed to blue too. All of it by vaporizing pigments of your iris using a laser.

More about it here [Link]

By Anupum Pant

What better way to detect Alzheimer’s than to make the subjects smell a table-spoon of peanut butter. It works and could be the next-gen low-cost and non-invasive way to test for Alzheimer’s.

Researchers at University of Florida designed a test where a subject was asked to close their eyes and one of their nostrils at a time. Once that was done, a cup full of peanut butter was continually moved towards their open nostril. At the point where they said they could detect the odour, the distance of the cup from their nostril was measured. The same was done next for the other nostril.

They found that the people who were affected with Alzheimer’s had a significant asymmetry in their ability to smell from the left and right nostril. On an average the right nostril of an Alzheimer’s patient could detect the peanut butter from about 20 cm, while the left could do it from about 10 cm. That’s is an asymmetry they consider significant. Their experiment was based on this…

The ability to smell is associated with the first cranial nerve and is often one of the first things to be affected in cognitive decline.

In the future, this could be a great and cheap way to screen for Alzheimer’s. Here is how it is done.

via [UFL news]

By Anupum Pant

From weird allergies to mad laughing diseases, Matthew Santoro shares with us 10 of the most mysterious and rare diseases doctors have ever encountered.

By Anupum Pant

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a salt of Glutamic acid and is common among natural products like tomatoes, potatoes and mushrooms. MSG is also a popular flavour enhancer used to enhance the umami spectrum of a particular dish. In it’s artificial powder form MSG looks like a bunch of white crystals (powder). Also, like Gluten, everybody is scared of MSG.

The scare has been around for a long time and almost everybody knows this. It’s called “monosodium glutamate symptom complex” or the “Chinese restaurant syndrome”. This term, actually an elaborate public cry, comes from a single letter that was sent to the New England Journal of Medicine by a man named Robert Ho Man Kwok. He wrote:

I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food. The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations.

Even though it is popularly believed that MSG in food gives people weird symptoms, it has actually never been demonstrated under rigorously controlled conditions. All of it originated from the letter above! The US FDA has given MSG a generally recognized as safe designation.

There’s an interesting experiment which went like this. To a group of people that had adverse affects from MSG, researchers gave them two meals. One of the meals was Chinese food without MSG in it. And the other was an Italian meal with huge amounts of MSG in it. The “MSG symptoms” were reported by most of them after they had the chinese meal, and the italian meal was apparently all good, caused no symptoms.

Artificially made powder MSG can be absorbed by the GI tract very quickly (unlike glutamic acid-containing proteins in naturally occurring foods), it can create a spike in the blood plasma levels. Theoretically this could cause mild damage to some areas of the brain and kinds of chronic diseases could result from this neurotoxicity. Also, this.

But again, it has been given a green flag by the FDA. So the scare that is going around, has not been proved scientifically.

By Anupum Pant

Apparently, it’s been known for about a hundred years that excessive consumption of carrots can cause your skin to turn orange/yellow. I didn’t know that. Well, now I know.

Also, carrots don’t make your eyesight better. I’ve written about that in the past. But here’s another thing that’s really interesting about carrots. Carrots are addictive!

In the year 1992 Czech researchers Ludek Cerný and Karel Cerný  published a paper in the British Journal of Addiction (BJA) described 3 cases in their paper. All of these cases involved men and women who had developed a strong addiction towards carrots, an addiction which they claimed was stronger than an addiction towards cigarettes. The men and women described in the paper knew that the addiction was stronger than that of nicotine because all of them were smokers.

Ironically, one of these cases described a man who was eating 5 bunches of carrots each day. And he had started eating them to get rid off his addiction of tobacco.

In another paper by Dr. Robert Kaplan, in the year 1996, a similar case came around. It was about a 49-year-old woman who was a compulsive carrot eater and ate about 2-3 kg of carrots everyday.

According to these papers, the psychological dependence on carrots arises basically from the carotene contained in it. However it is believed that it is also a result of some other active ingredient contained in carrots.

The withdrawal symptom is so intense that the afflicted persons get hold of and consume carrots even in socially quite unacceptable situations.

[Read more]

By Anupum Pant

Often apocryphal stories get posted around and go viral on social media. And most times it is hard to discern the real from the fake. This story, of a newborn coming back to life from being clinically dead, seems like one of those posts which are made with a sole aim in mind – make it go viral on social media. But trust me, even if it seems unreal, it’s actually true.

Kate Ogg prematurely gave birth to twins, one of which was announced clinically dead after doctors couldn’t get him to breathe. Her son Jamie who was born after just 27 weeks of pregnancy languished within twenty minutes of birth. His twin sister however survived the premature birth.

After about five minutes after doctor had pronounced him dead, Jamie started displaying random, startled movements. According to doctors, it was normal a normal reflex and did not mean that Jamie was alive.

The mother was devastated and wanted to hold her son. She held him tight and caressed the body for about two hours. Miraculously, the baby’s movements started becoming more pronounced after the mother’s magical touch. And soon he opened his eyes!

It was later understood that the mother unknowingly did something called “kangaroo care” – named after kangaroos of course, in which the just born’s body generates heat just like a newborn kangaroo does when it’s held in its mother’s pouch.

The medical benefits of skin-to-skin contact have been long known among the scientific community, but it is not encouraged, and also not allowed at many hospitals in developed countries. It’s very common for mother’s in poorer countries to do this where incubators may not be available for premature babies.

[Read more]