Situs Inversus is a rare birth defect in which a person is born with organs facing backwards. A patient in India may be the only living person known to have the affliction:
In Mr Shivnani’s case, they discovered the aorta and inferior vena cava, which pump clean blood in and impure blood from the heart were reversed. He also has two livers.
“While operating we were supposed to know the exact location of everything that we are going to touch. But in this case we were not sure which veins were entering where,” Dr Prakash Sanzgiri told the Times of India.
Surgeons also found he had no small intestine and three vessels supplying blood to his infected kidney.
Link | Information about Situs Inversus | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services
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Edgar Parker opened his dental practice in 1892 and found business was not that great. So he took his practice on the road and became “the P.T. Barnum of dentistry.” Dentistry as entertainment?
Working in the 1890s during the height of ‘humbugs,’ ‘dime museums’, and rational amusements, Parker did what any natural-born-showman would do. He took a cue from the best and hired one of P.T. Barnam’s ex-managers to help him take his practice on the road. From his horse drawn office, amid his show girls and buglers, Parker promised that he would painlessly extract a rotten tooth for 50 cents. And if the extraction wasn’t painless, he would give the customer $5.00, the equivalent of roughly $115 today. Parker’s band actually served a three way purpose. First it drew a crowd. Second, it distracted the patient whose tooth was being pulled (along with a healthy cup of whiskey or an aqueous solution of cocaine he called “hydrocaine,”) and third, it drowned out any possible moans of pain emitted from a patient.
Parker even legally changed his first name to Painless. Link
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Three years ago, Gail blogged about a bra implanted inside human breast tissue to take the place of an external bra. Plastic surgeons have greatly developed this idea since that time. So far, 600 women have undergone the surgery:
Conceived by South African plastic surgeons and currently being performed in Europe, the Internal Bra System is a breast-lift operation that places a mesh-like material inside the breast to support the new shape.
The cone-shaped material, named Breform, is similar to what is used in hernia operations. It’s meant to take the strain off the skin, which after a traditional breast lift can begin to stretch and sag in three years, according to The Daily Mail.
“Breform is like a bra cup without the straps,” plastic surgeon Dalvi Humzah told The Daily Mail. “Over time, the mesh gets incorporated into the breast as the body produces a fibrous tissue that holds the structure in place – like a permanent bra under the skin.”
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo: Breform
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The stethoscope was invented by a doctor too embarrassed to place his ear on a woman’s ample bosom.
Before the invention of the stethoscope, a physician would listen to a patient’s heart by placing his ear over the chest.
In 1816, René Laennec, a physician and devout Catholic, was called to examine a young woman suspected to have a diseased heart. According to the medical procedure of the time, Laennec tapped his hand on the patient’s back and tried to listen to the resulting sound (the "thumpyness" of the sound was used in diagnosis). Unfortunately, because the patient was too fat, he couldn’t hear anything.
Too embarrassed to put his head on the young woman’s ample bosom to listen closer, Laennec came up with a simple yet brilliant solution: he rolled a piece of paper into a cylinder and used that to listen to the patient’s heartbeat.
Laennec later created a new instrument made from hollow wooden cylinder he called stethoscope, from the Greek words stethos (chest) and skopos (examination).
Now, you would think that such an invention would be universally embraced by the physicians of his time, but you’d be wrong. Even the founder of the American Heart Association, Lewis A. Conner, resisted the stethoscope, preferring to listen to the heart directly over the chest of the patient.
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Psst – wanna lose weight while eating all you want and doing no exercise? No, it’s not a spammy Internet ad – it’s real science! All you have to do is live a while at high altitude:
Overweight, sedentary people who spent a week at an elevation of 8,700 feet lost weight while eating as much as they wanted and doing no exercise. A month after they came back down, they had kept two-thirds of those pounds off. The results appear in the Feb. 4 Obesity. [...]
The scientists ferried 20 overweight, middle-aged men by train and cable car to a research station perched 1,000 feet below the peak of Germany’s highest mountain, Zugspitze. During the week-long stay, the men could eat and drink as much as they liked and were forbidden from any exercise other than leisurely strolls. The team measured the men’s weight, metabolic rate, levels of hunger and satiety hormones before, during, and after their mountain retreat.
After a week up high, the subjects lost an average of 3 pounds. A month later, they were still 2 pounds lighter. The sceintists’ data showed this was likely because they ate about 730 calories less at high altitudes than they did at normal elevations. They may have felt less hungry, in part, because levels of leptin, the satiety hormone, surged during the stay, while grehlin, the hunger hormone, remained unchanged. Their metabolic rate also spiked, meaning they burned more calories than they usually did.
A high-altitude weight loss strategy could be viable, though studies have shown peoples’ appetites bounce back after about six months at high elevation, Leissner said. “If you could do intermittent periods for one week, then go down, and then go back up, this might actually be helpful.”
Link (Photo Stephan A [Flickr])
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Cognitive fluency is a fancy name given by psychologists to describe something simple: most people prefer things that are easy to think about than those that are hard.
That’s pretty intuitive albeit overly simple – but does cognitive fluency really factor into our daily lives? Perhaps more than you’re even aware of, according to this article by Drake Bennett of The Boston Globe:
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. [...]
One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font.
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When a conscious person answers a yes or no question, certain parts of the brain become active. A new medical study revealed that people thought to be in a vegetative state demonstrate the same brain response, even if they can’t express themselves:
In the current experiment, the researchers found that three other patients identified as vegetative showed similar responses. To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”
They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.
“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who developed the method and was a co-author of the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.”
Video at the link.
Link via Popular Science | Image: New York Times
Previously on Neatorama:
Man Actually Conscious Throughout Two Decades of “Coma”
Is This Man Fully Alert and Communicating – or Not?
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22-year-old Julia Popova was mugged on her way home from work in Moscow. She struggled with the purse-snatcher and was so shocked by the experience that she didn’t realize he’d left a 6-inch knife sticking in her neck at the top of her back!
Her horrified parents rushed her to hospital where surgeons managed to remove the blade without damaging Julia’s spine.
“Shock had kicked in and her body prevented her from feeling any pain. She simply walked home without feeling the knife in her back,” said one medic.
Warning: the full picture at the link may be disturbing. Link -via Arbroath
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In 2007, Miss Cellania covered the story of Oscar, the cat who lives in Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island, and who curls up next to patients mere hours before they die.
Since then, Oscar has doubled his predictions to 50. But the staff of the hospice, particularly Dr. David Dosa, want the world to know it’s not as ominous as it may sound. The experience shared between them, patients, and family members is nothing short of remarkable, although Oscar’s methods are surely more natural than supernatural.
Dosa said there is no scientific evidence to explain Oscar’s abilities, but he thinks the cat might be responding to a pheromone or smell that humans simply don’t recognize.
(He) recounts one instance when staff were convinced of the imminent death of one patient but Oscar refused to sit with that person, choosing instead to be on the bed of another patient down the hallway. Oscar proved to be right. The person he sat with died first, taking staff on the ward by surprise.
Dr. Dosa hopes to educate people about terminal illness, with a little help from Oscar’s story. ”I wanted to write a book that would go beyond Oscar’s peculiarities, to tell why he is important to family members and caregivers who have been with him at the end of a life.”
Link Photo credit: Dina Rudick/Globe Staff
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Sisso the swift was found with a damaged wing seven months ago. The little bird has healed, but must learn to fly all over again with some inventive physical therapy. Sisso takes flying lessons suspended from a custom-made sling!
The swift is being treated at an Israeli animal hospital and it is thanks to this ingenious device – which resembles a mobile in a child’s bedroom – that he can practise flying.
Fitting snugly into a red tube-like vest made of bandages and gauze pads, Sisso has holes for his head, wings, feet and tail.
A string is fixed to the harness and attached to the ceiling which allows him to whizz around a room at the Ramat Gan Safari Park Animal Hospital without falling to the floor.
However, until the muscles in his weakened right wing become strong enough, he will be kept indoors and in the sling.
Sisso will be freed when he can fly normally again. Link -via mental_floss
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Terri Carlson is 45 years old, has health problems because of a genetic C4 complement deficiency, and her COBRA health insurance will expire in a year.
It is not easy living with my disease and now that I have the genetic answer for my health issues, every insurance company uses the information to deny me insurance coverage. You know, I am not happy I was delt [sic] this deck of cards in my life. However, if I don’t fight for myself nobody will. While the goverment fights over healthcare reform people like me suffer. I will continue on this crusade for healthcare reform.
And yes, as drastic as it sounds, I will marry for health insurance!!!
Is this a real person’s website? A joke? A political ploy? Stay tuned.
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Henrietta Lacks, an impoverished tobacco farmer in Virginia, contracted cervical cancer in 1951. Her doctor gave a sample of her tumor to a medical researcher, who then used it to grow a cell culture. What’s amazing is that in almost sixty years, those cells are still alive, making them the longest-living human cells grown in a laboratory. Journalist Rebecca Skloot has written a book about Lacks and her cells, and submitted to an interview with Smithsonian:
Henrietta’s cells were the first immortal human cells ever grown in culture. They were essential to developing the polio vaccine. They went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity. Many scientific landmarks since then have used her cells, including cloning, gene mapping and in vitro fertilization.
Skloot writes about how scientists are using these unusual cells to study human immunity. But her book is also about how the scientific world collided with a largely illiterate family and how the human body has become a commodity.
Link | Photo: Lacks family, via Smithsonian
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Neatorama readers may remember Lakshmi Tatma, the little girl who was born with eight limbs due to a headless parasitic twin. The twin was surgically removed two years ago. Lakshmi is now four years old and has started school, but her physical problems are not over.
Six months after the complex operation to remove Lakshmi’s parasitic twin, doctors discovered she had developed scoliosis, or a curvature of the spine.
Without a complex operation to correct her spine doctors have warned her back will be forced into increasingly severe deformities as she grows, possibly leaving her disabled.
Separately, Lakshmi requires an operation to ‘detether’ her spine after it was discovered she was born with abnormal tissue connecting the spinal cord to her nervous system.
In a further operation orthopaedic surgeons must perform a procedure to ‘close her hips’, which are set too far apart and result in an unusual ‘gaited’ walk.
The charity that looks after Lakshmi’s progress is stretched to its limit, so a fund has been set up for her future operations. Link -via Digg
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Ever wondered how the body defends against diseases and other attacks? In the following article from the Geeks are Sexy blog, learn the basic philosophy behind the immune system.
We live in a world governed not by the biggest creatures, but by the smallest. Our bodies act as vessels for all that we call “ourselves,” forming a barrier between “out there” and “in here.” While that barrier is not as simple as a wall or a single membrane, the philosophy is made real by a complex defense network called the immune system.
From the Upcoming 
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At a site south of Paris, France, archaeologists Cécile Buquet-Marcon and Anaick Samzun discovered what they believe to be evidence of a successful and intentional arm amputation:
The man, who lived in the Linearbandkeramik period, when European hunter-gatherers began subsistence farming, was found to be missing his forearm and hand bones.[...]
Pain-killing plants such as the hallucinogenic Datura are likely to have been used in the operation, and the wound was probably cleaned using antiseptic herbs like sage, the scientists said.
“I don’t think you could say that those who carried out the operation were doctors in the modern sense that they did only that, but they obviously had medical knowledge,” Mrs Buquet-Marcon said.
Link | Photo: Stephanie Watson
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Neatorama has featured a number of stories about animals who have received prosthetics before, including Beauty the Bald Eagle, who lost her beak when it was shot by a hunter. WebEcoist has a great collection of these stories including many you probably haven’t seen yet.
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Unlike conventional modern “magic,” what was involved in the underwater breathhold was not special effects or hidden technology. Instead, Blaine prepared using a combination of hypoxic tent training to increase his hematocrit, preloading with 100% oxygen, meditation to decrease his oxygen consumption, and hyperventilation to delay his hypercapnic response.
As a useful reference point, his 17-minute breathhold time is almost the same length as this 20-minute TED talk. It’s also worth noting here as an addendum that the hyperventilation (“purging”) he describes should not be attempted by amateurs to increase underwater breathhold time while swimming or diving. The technique does allow a longer breathhold, but does not provide additional oxygen, so novices can become disoriented from hypoxia and drown.
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Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, UK. In 1665, the bubonic plague hit its population. Rather than flee, the villagers were persuaded that they had a moral obligation to isolate themselves from the outside world in order to prevent the spread of that disease:
They lined up stones to mark the village boundaries, and no one was allowed beyond them. Supplies of food and clothing brought to the village from the outside were left at the boundary stones and were paid for with coins placed in a disinfectant of vinegar and water.
The horror increased as the months passed. By the end of August 1666, two-thirds of the original population had perished. Format burial services were no longer held. When the cemetery became full, the dead were buried in gardens and fields.
Only a fourth of the population had survived when outsiders made contact a year later. Today, although the village was subsequently resettled, much of it is a museum and a memorial to its inhabitants.
Link via The Presurfer | Official Website | Photo: Cressbrook Multimedia
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The museum, formerly called the Army Medical Museum, is now part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. It houses millions of artifacts in a variety of historically significant collections. Selections from their photographic archives have been assembled in a Flickr photostream, which “began as unofficial ‘favorite photos’ of the staff of the Otis Historical Archives” at the museum.
The subject material is understandably weighted toward anatomic and pathologic specimens, but also includes historical photos re public health and the delivery of health care in war and in peacetime.
Links for the museum and the photostream. Photo credit Joe Clark.
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Can you imagine telepathically sending messages to those around you, seeing out of a tooth or discovering a volcanic crater filled with all types of new species never before seen by man? Scientists can and while many of the new discoveries listed on this WebEcoist article have been featured on Neatorama before, they are all fascinating enough to deserve a second look.
What’s your favorite recent discovery? I personally like the volcanic crater the best because I’m a sucker for animals.
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Linda De Croock was injured in a traffic accident 25 years ago that left her with a crushed windpipe. Since then, her throat has been held open by metal stents until a new procedure in organ transplant gave her a new trachea. Dr. Pierre Delaere and his team at the University Hospital in Leuven, Belgium transplanted the windpipe twice to acclimate the patient to the new organ.
The windpipe was taken from a dead man and implanted in her forearm where her own tissue grew around the cartilage scaffold. When the organ came to be transplanted to her throat, her body did not consider it foreign and accepted it.
It is thought to be the first time an organ as large as a windpipe has been implanted into the recipient’s body to develop before the final transplant.
Ms de Croock did not have to take anti-rejection drugs, which meant she was not at risk of complications such as a higher likelihood of cancer.
Dr. Delaere waited a year after the successful surgery before reporting on it to the New England Journal of Medicine. They hope this technique will help other transplant patients live without anti-rejection drugs. Link -via Discover Magazine
(image credit: AP)
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Doctors Without Borders is setting up shop in Haiti to provide medical services to those affected by the earthquake. They will use an inflatable hospital.
It’s exactly what it sounds like: a temporary hospital with inflatable components that can be deployed whenever needed. Doctors Without Borders has been employing them for years, including an impressive inflatable nine-tent, 120-bed center in Pakistan following a 7.6 magnitude earthquake there in 2005. The hospital post-and-beam frames can be made from the same fabric in inflatable lifeboats. Nylon interior and exterior walls leave space for air to create an insulating effect.
Link -via Cynical-C, who has a list of resources for sending donations to Haiti.
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You’ll be on video at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, but not for security purposes. An infrared camera scans incoming international passengers looking for people who may have a fever! Those who show signs of a fever are interviewed and may be given medical treatment. Link
(image credit: Lazlo Thoth)
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Last October, I posted about a drug that binds antibodies to cocaine to diminish its pleasurable effects in users. Well, it’s not working out terribly well because some users are responding by taking enough cocaine to overwhelm its protection:
Nobody overdosed, but some of them had 10 times more cocaine coursing through their systems than researchers had encountered before, according to Kosten. He said some of the addicts reported to researchers that they had gone broke buying cocaine from multiple drug dealers, hoping to find a variety that would get them high.
Thankfully, the drug was able to help some test subjects avoid cocaine.
Link via Popular Science | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services
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The process of freezing to death is presented in horrifying detail in this classic article. It’s not just a matter of getting cold and dying. For example, just before they freeze, people with hypothermia tear their clothes off in a fit of what’s called "paradoxical undressing."
At 85 degrees, those freezing to death, in a strange, anguished paroxysm, often rip off their clothes. This phenomenon, known as paradoxical undressing, is common enough that urban hypothermia victims are sometimes initially diagnosed as victims of sexual assault. Though researchers are uncertain of the cause, the most logical explanation is that shortly before loss of consciousness, the constricted blood vessels near the body’s surface suddenly dilate and produce a sensation of extreme heat against the skin.
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A group of British scientists suggest that you will soon be able to replace missing teeth by growing replacements.
The procedure is fairly simple. Doctors take stem cells from the patient. These are unique in their ability to form any of the tissues that make up the body. By carefully nurturing the stem cells in a laboratory, scientists can nudge the cells down a path that will make them grow into a tooth. After a couple of weeks, the ball of cells, known as a bud, is ready to be implanted. Tests reveal what type of tooth – for example, a molar or an incisor – the bud will form.
The procedure holds great promise in the U.K., where “the average Briton over 50 has lost 12 teeth from a set of 32.”
Link. Image credit to Coverbrowser, which has a collection of 470 Mad covers.
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Have you lost that "lovin’ feelin’"? The Righteous Brothers may not know it when they sang the number-one hit single in 1965, but you can blame a hormone called neutrophin:
A team from the University of Pisa in Italy found the bodily chemistry which makes people sexually attractive to new partners lasts, at most, two years. [...]
The Italian researchers tested the levels of the hormones called neutrophins in the blood of volunteers who were rated on a passionate love scale.
Levels of these chemical messengers were much higher in those who were in the early stages of romance. [...]
But in people who had been with their partners for between one and two years these so-called "love molecules" had gone, even though the relationship had survived.
The scientists found that the lust molecule was replaced by the so-called "cuddle hormone" – oxytocin – in couples who had been together for several years.
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Just because it’s holy water, it doesn’t mean that it’s also sterile water! To guard against swine flu, Italian inventor Luciano Marabrese invented the automatic holy water dispenser:
The terracotta dispenser, used in the northern town of Fornaci di Briosco, functions like an automatic soap dispenser in public washrooms — a churchgoer waves his or her hand under a sensor and the machine spurts out holy water.
"It has been a bit of a novelty. People initially were a bit shocked by this technological innovation but then they welcomed it with great enthusiasm and joy. The members of this parish have got used to it," said Father Pierangelo Motta.
Catholics entering and leaving churches usually dip their hands into fonts full of holy water — which has been blessed by a priest — and make the sign of the cross.
But fear of contracting the H1N1 virus has led many in Italy — where some 15 people have died of swine flu — not to dip their hands in the communal water font.
"It’s great," said worshipper Marta Caimm as she entered the church. "Thanks to this we are not worried about catching swine flu. It is the right thing for the times," she said.
Link (Photo: Stefano Rellandini/REUTERS) | Video clip (embedded YouTube clip) at TYWKIWDBI
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The picture above is a 3D image of some of the neural connections in an owl-monkey’s brain. The Human Connectome Project of the US National Institutes for Health is currently engaged in a similar, but more ambitious project: to map every connection in the human brain. It’s like a circuit map for neurologists:
The complexity of the brain and a lack of adequate imaging technology have hampered past research on human brain connectivity. The brain is estimated to contain more than 100 billion neurons that form trillions of connections with each other. Neurons can connect across distant regions of the brain by extending long, slender projections called axons — but the trajectories that axons take within the human brain are almost entirely uncharted.[...]
The field of neuroscience emerged in the late 19th century, when scientists observed individual brain cells for the first time. Since then, researchers have made breathtaking progress in understanding the anatomy, cell biology, physiology and chemistry of the brain in both health and disease. Yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered, including how brain function translates into mental function and why brain function declines with age. Advances in neuroimaging, genomics, computational neuroscience and engineering have put us on the brink of another great era in neuroscience, when we can expect to make unprecedented discoveries regarding normal brain activity, disorders of the brain and our very sense of self.
Press Release and Article Link via GearFuse | Image: Van Wadeen
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This article about rabies surprised me a little.
See, we know how to prevent rabies, but we have absolutely no idea how to cure it. In fact, we don’t even really know how it kills people. Despite (and, perhaps, because of) its status as one of the first viruses to be tamed by a vaccine, rabies remains a little-understood disease.
What about all those stories you hear of someone being bitten by a rabid animal and having to get painful shots? I thought that was the cure, but it turns out those shots are actually a vaccine after the fact.
“You think about flu, that’s a very quick virus. You develop symptoms in a couple of days. In a week, it’s passed. But rabies incubation is very long,” said Zhen Fu, DVM Ph.D., professor of pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. “It may be weeks or even months before you develop an active infection. So we have enough time after a bite to immunize with normal vaccine and bring up the immune system.”
New treatments for vaccine show promise, but with few cases to study, the results are not conclusive. Maggie Koerth-Baker researched the disease after she found a bat in her living room. Link
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