Удивительные факты о человеческом теле: от стоимости его создания до скрытых механизмов восприятия

This post may include affiliate links. #1 #2 That's all he had every day. That's it. He couldn't understand why his heart disease wasn't getting better, why he'd put on weight, why he was now showing high blood sugar and was borderline diabetic. Edit: Seriously guys - to the people telling me "but bacon isn't bad food!" or whatever; I never said it was. Read what I posted, especially the bit where I said "That's all he had every day. That's it." because if you can't process that with the rest of what I've said, I think you're in danger of becoming a patient mentioned in threads like this. #3 We spend so much time taking care of our bodies, yet there’s still an incredible amount we don’t know about what’s happening beneath the surface. For instance, most of us know that an adult human skeleton has 206 bones, but did you know that babies are born with around 300 bones? As they grow, some of those bones gradually fuse together, eventually forming the 206 bones found in the typical adult skeleton. These bones are divided into two main groups: the axial skeleton, which contains 80 bones and forms the central axis of the body, including the skull, spine, ribs, and sternum, and the appendicular skeleton, which contains 126 bones in the shoulders, arms, hands, pelvis, legs, and feet. #4 #5 Also - there is a saying in rural areas, that "it hurt so bad I could have shot it off". A woman came in who had sprained her ankle. She couldn't take the pain, so we ended up treating her for a self inflicted gunshot wound to the foot. #6 She didn't like her natural eye colour, so she had bought a set of blue coloured lenses 8 months earlier. Never removed them, not even during night time. Didn't even think to mention this to me, claimed to have no "foreign materials" in her eyes. Needless to say, I gave her quite the harsh lecture and a referal to an ophtalmologist. Interestingly, even some basic facts about our bodies aren't as well known as you might expect. A USANA-sponsored survey of 2,000 Americans conducted through OnePoll found that 35% of respondents didn't know their own blood type. The survey also found that only about one in 10 people knew that O-negative is considered the universal red-blood-cell donor type, while just one quarter correctly identified the four main blood groups: A, B, AB, and O. Knowing your blood type can be useful information, particularly when it comes to blood donation, pregnancy care, and medical situations. Of course, hospitals still test and confirm a person's blood type before giving a transfusion, but knowing your own can certainly be helpful when you're trying to understand your health. #7 Well... turns out Cooter hadn't been able to eat actual food in months, was subsisting on pretty much just beer, and hadn't pooped in over two weeks. But that didn't bother him a bit... until he couldn't have the beer. *Then* it was an emergency! He had a big ol' tumor blocking the distal part of his left colon (so near the end of the road, intestinally speaking), and everything gradually got backed up all the way to his stomach. That's why he couldn't keep a beer down--there was just no more room at the inn. I fixed him with a colostomy, and he got better and left. He refused chemo and I figured he'd just go home and pass away of cancer. But then, almost exactly one year later, he came back to me with just about the same complaint... obstructed to the point of not being able to drink beer. Except this time, it was that his ostomy had essentially retracted into his abdomen and the skin had nearly grown shut over it. He was pooping out of a teeny-tiny hole in his skin. Even my oldest partners had never seen anything like it, but once again Cooter wasn't remotely fazed. He just wanted us to fix it so he could go home and keep drinking. I did. Haven't seen Cooter since. I kind of hope he's still out there, treating his cancer with Budweiser and just blissfully ignoring the Grim Reaper. #8 #9 TL;DR: Bite the sun and cure you tonsilitis. And sometimes, the best way to appreciate just how fascinating the human body is is to look at it from a completely different perspective. That’s exactly what Bill Bryson does in The Body: A Guide for Occupants, a lively and often funny exploration of how our bodies work and what makes them so remarkable. The book is packed with fascinating, mind-boggling, and occasionally gross facts about human biology, including one particularly fun question: How much would it actually cost to build a human being from scratch? Citing a Royal Society of Chemistry calculation, Bryson notes that the 59 elements needed to construct a human body, using Benedict Cumberbatch as the example, would cost around $151,578. Of course, that price only reflects the estimated value of the raw elements—not the rather more complicated task of turning them into a living, breathing human being. #10 #11 #12 And the more you learn about the human body, the more you realize that even some of our most familiar sensations are not quite as straightforward as they seem. We cannot actually feel wetness directly. Human skin doesn't have specific receptors dedicated to detecting “wetness.” Instead, researchers believe that the brain works out that something is wet by combining other sensory information, particularly changes in temperature and mechanical sensations on the skin. That's why water can feel wet even though your skin is really detecting a combination of different signals. In other words, that familiar sensation of being wet is partly your brain making sense of the information your skin is sending it. Pretty impressive, considering how effortlessly we experience it every day. #13 #14 Then there was the lady wearing short shorts and no underwear who raised her leg and showed me the puss-filled wound on her labia ... while in the middle of the waiting room. I don't miss rural OB/Gyn experiences. #15 When you zoom out from how the body experiences the world to what it's actually made of, the answer is surprisingly simple. You might not have enjoyed studying the periodic table at school, but those chemical elements are literally what make you, you. Just six elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus—account for roughly 99% of the human body's mass. Oxygen and hydrogen are especially abundant because the body contains a large amount of water, while carbon forms the backbone of many of the molecules that make up our cells and tissues. Nitrogen is essential for proteins and DNA, while calcium and phosphorus are particularly important for bones and teeth. So, despite being an incredibly complicated biological system, the human body is built largely from a surprisingly small collection of elements. #16 #17 She had a 2 and a 4 year old. Fortunately, I could convince her to only try camels milk for a finite amount of time and then follow up with our oncologist to see if camels milk did the trick. #18 So she used the next best thing she found and meticulously scrubbed her chest with steel wool. We use the internet every day and are used to information traveling almost instantly, but our own bodies have an impressive communication network too. Nerve signals can travel at speeds of around 120 meters per second, or roughly 430 km/h, in the fastest myelinated human nerve fibers. These electrical signals allow your brain and body to communicate incredibly quickly, helping you move, react to danger, feel sensations, and coordinate everything from walking to picking up a cup of coffee. So while your Wi-Fi connection might occasionally let you down, your nervous system has been running its own high-speed communication network inside you all along. #19 - The patient who fixed an appointment for a pedicure the day after open heart surgery. He said that he'd just sneak out of the ICU and that nobody would notice. - The patient who had an amputation of half of his foot and decided that it would be a good idea to walk to the toilet after returning to his room, covering the floor in bloody footsteps because the suture ripped open again. - The patient who said that he didn't have any previous operations, but was basically covered in scars... when asked about each of them, he suddenly remembered having about 15 surgeries for various accidents. - The patient who forgot that he had his kidney, spleen and part of the colon removed (because of a tumor). - The patient who decided that he'd never take more than three pills a day. He was on four or five different meds at that time, and basically just chose at random which meds he was going to take which day. #20 Well, the doctor is preparing to go into this room, but I did not expect what would happen next. He opened the door, and I almost barfed. It was extremely hard to keep my professional composure. The guy had his leg wrapped up. The doctor asked him to unwrap it, and it was gangrene. From his foot up to the middle of his thigh. The smell I had been smelling was rotting flesh. The cause? "The four-wheeler I was riding caught fire six months ago.".