10 Medical Facts You Probably Don't Know

Do you want to know some medical facts you haven't probably heard from any book or anyone? Read along and follow this article about interesting facts in the medical word.

1. The Self Appendectomy.

It happened during 6th Soviet Antarctic Expedition at Novolazarevskaya Station. The patient "Leonid Rogozov" was the only physician on station, so the assistant was a mechanic. It was on April 30, 1961. The operation took 2 hours. He positioned himself so that he could see his own body using a mirror when doing the surgery, he made a 12 cm cut through which he found and removed the appendix. After 5 days the doctor felt good, and after 7 days he removed the wires which had been used to sew up the body.

1. The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Scientists have yet to settle on adefinitive amount, but the storage capacity of the brain in electronic terms is thought to be between 3 or even 1,000 terabytes. The National Archives of Britain, containing over 900 years of history, only takes up 70 terabytes, making your brain’s memory power pretty darn impressive.

1. Avoiding Lawsuits Instead of Providing Health Care.

A Jackson Healthcare survey uncovered that the vast majority of doctors, 92 percent, made medical decisions according to legal concerns rather than providing the best standard of diagnostic care for their patients. Every year, patients endure hundred of thousands of unnecessary tests and procedures, ordered to avoid any potential of medical malpractice. Eight percent of all surgeries, 14 percent of prescriptions and more than a quarter of all tests are performed to avoid litigation. The resulting cost to the American health care system alone measures between $650-$850 billion per year. Even worse, some doctors actively avoid treating patients listed as “high-risk cases” for lawsuits.

1. For every pound of fat gained, you add seven miles of new blood vessels.

New tissue needs blood supply, so your vascular system expands to accommodate it. This also means your heart must work harder to pump blood through the new network, which may reduce oxygenation and nutrient replenishment in other tissues. Lose a pound? Your body will break down and reabsorb the unneeded blood vessels from the previous tissue.

1. 1. .Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toe nails. If you notice that you’re trimming your fingernails much more frequently than your toenails you’re not just imagining it. The nails that get the most exposure and are used most frequently grow the fastest. On average, nails on both the toes and fingers grow about one-tenth of an inch each month.

1. The largest internal organ is the small intestine.

Despite being called the smaller of the two intestines, your small intestine is actually four times as long as the average adult is tall. If it weren’t looped back and forth upon itself it wouldn’t fit inside the abdominal cavity.

1. Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s.The main reason for this is simply that on average women tend to be smaller than men and have less mass to pump blood to. But women’s and men’s hearts can actually act quite differently, especially when experiencing trauma like a heart attack, and many treatments that work for men must be adjusted or changed entirely to work for women. Additionally, over a lifetime, at your normal (resting) heart rate you will have pumped enough blood to fill thirteen oil super tankers. To further expound on this fact, on average, your heart beats 40,000,000 times per year. Doing the math, over your lifetime (both men and women averaged), that results in 2,600,000,000 heartbeats (two billion, six hundred million). This does not even factor in your increased heartbeats due to your love of exercise or fear.

1. You could remove a large part of your internal organs and survive.The human body may appear fragile but it’s possible to survive even with the removal of the stomach, the spleen, 75 percent of the liver, 80 percent of the intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organfrom the pelvic and groin area. You might not feel too great, but the missing organs wouldn’t kill you.

1. On any given day, sexual intercourse takes place over 120 million times on earth. Humans are a quickly proliferating species, and with about 4% of the world’s population having sex on any given day, it’s no wonder that birth rates continue to increase in many places all over the world.

1. Dimples are caused by an abnormally short facial muscle.

The zygomaticus major, a facial muscle, is attached to the skin of your cheeks. Dimples appear when the muscle pulls hard enough on your cheeks to cause visible indentations on your face. This usually occurs when we speak or smile, when the muscle is contracting. For some people, the dimples are always there. This occurs when the muscle is too short.This is a condition that is extremely common among children. As they get older the dimples usually begin to disappear.

Culled: Explorers(Nairaland)