Intellect PlusHealth, medicine and disease
991 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 17.
An allergic gullet can look like heartburn yet shrug off acid blockersIn eosinophilic esophagitis, immune cells that should never be in the gullet flood into it, apparently in response to food. The result mimics acid reflux, with trouble swallowing …
Sir George Downing built Downing Street but never lived thereNaming things after people is ancient: Assyrians labelled each year after an official in the second millennium BC. Eponyms now run from the sandwich to Parkinson disease, and they…
Most adults carry a lifelong virus now tied to multiple sclerosisAbout 90% of American adults show signs of past infection with Epstein–Barr virus, usually picked up through saliva and never noticed. It hides in memory B cells for life. It was …
The Filipino chemist who found erythromycin never saw a royaltyIn 1952 Abelardo Aguilar mailed soil samples from the Philippines to Eli Lilly and pulled a new antibiotic from a microbe living in them. Lilly launched it that year as Ilosone, n…
Glaucoma steals side vision first, often before anyone notices anything wrongGlaucoma earned the nickname silent thief of sight because it usually erodes vision so gradually that people miss it. Raised pressure inside the eye is the best-known risk, yet ma…
In Graves' disease, antibodies impersonate a hormone and send the thyroid into overdriveGraves' disease happens when the immune system makes antibodies that lock onto the thyroid and mimic the signal telling it to produce hormone. The gland obeys nonstop, causing rac…
A cup of ale could change what London's plague records said killed youThe Great Plague of 1665 to 1666 killed an estimated 100,000 Londoners, almost a quarter of the city, in 18 months. Yet the death counts were shaky: parish searchers, often poor i…
London's best coal went abroad, leaving the sulphurous dregs to choke the cityFor five days in December 1952 a yellow-green smog so thick it seeped into cinemas settled over London. Officials counted about 4,000 deaths; later research puts the toll nearer 1…
In much of Europe, a PhD is only the first of two doctoratesAcross Germany, France, Poland and elsewhere, many would-be professors must earn a second, harder qualification called the habilitation, often five to fifteen years after their Ph…- G-force is not really a force, and gravity alone never produces itAstronauts orbiting Earth are still firmly in its gravity, yet they feel no g-force at all. That is because g-force measures the push of floors, seats and engines against free fal…
- Chronic acid reflux can quietly dissolve tooth enamel from the insideHeartburn is the famous symptom of reflux disease, but stomach acid escaping upward can also cause a chronic cough, a hoarse voice, asthma-like wheezing and eroded teeth. Between …
Seeing the same family doctor over years is linked to lower death ratesGeneral practitioners are the generalists of medicine, handling almost anything that walks in and deciding who needs a specialist. Their secret weapon is time: studies show that s…
Chronic worry may be the brain's smoke alarm set far too sensitiveEvolutionary thinkers argue that anxiety works like a smoke detector: a false alarm costs little, while missing a real fire can be fatal. In generalized anxiety disorder that alar…
The lowest possible Glasgow Coma Scale score is 3, not zeroEmergency teams worldwide rate consciousness from 3 to 15 by testing just three things: the eyes, speech and movement. Two Glasgow doctors built the scale in 1974 because a dozen …- Marathon runners can get sick from drinking too much plain waterAbout one in ten people competing in endurance events end up with hyponatremia, blood sodium diluted below 135 mmol/L, often after sweating hard and gulping water without electrol…
- Adding iodine to table salt quietly prevented a common hormone diseaseAround a billion people worldwide may lack enough iodine, the element the thyroid needs to build its hormones. Shortage is the leading global cause of an underactive thyroid, whic…
Doctors grade dangerous blood loss using the scoring of a tennis matchLose under 15 percent of your blood volume, then 15 to 30, then 30 to 40, then more than 40: those four bands of hypovolemic shock echo tennis scores of 15, 30 and 40. Hypovolemia…
Removing the uterus can bring menopause years early, even when ovaries stayHysterectomy, surgical removal of the uterus, is usually reserved for severe problems like fibroids, endometriosis or cancer once other options fail. Its effects ripple outward: m…
For almost four thousand years doctors blamed a wandering wombAn Egyptian papyrus from 1900 BCE attributed women's odd behaviour to a uterus roaming the body, and physicians tried to coax it home with smells. The idea gave us the word hyster…
Hashish was a Victorian painkiller before it became a smuggler's commodityDoctors in late 19th century Europe and America prescribed hashish for migraine, period pain, whooping cough and insomnia, and Germany tried it as an anaesthetic in 1869. Paris wr…
The Nashville hospital chain behind history's biggest buyout and a record fraud caseHCA started with one Nashville hospital in 1968 and within thirteen years ran 349. It has since gone private three times, including a roughly $33 billion buyout in 2006 that was t…
Water on the brain looks different in a baby, a teenager and a grandparentHydrocephalus means cerebrospinal fluid is piling up in or around the brain. In a newborn, whose skull plates have not fused, the head visibly swells. In an older child it shows u…- A heart muscle that grows too thick can hide for years, then strikeUp to one in 500 people have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a mostly inherited thickening of the heart's walls. Many feel nothing at all. Others get breathlessness, chest pain or fa…
Repeated sugar crashes can switch off the body's own alarmMost people feel low blood sugar around 55 mg/dL: sweating, a racing heart, sudden hunger. Yet people with diabetes who suffer frequent lows can lose those warning signs entirely,…
One flu subtype, H1N1, lies behind three pandemics across a centuryThe label H1N1 simply names the two surface proteins a flu virus carries. Yet strains of this one subtype caused the 1918 pandemic, the 1977 Russian flu and the 2009 swine flu, ea…
Some insomniacs sleep for hours yet swear they were awake all nightAt any given moment, somewhere from 10% to 30% of adults are living with insomnia, and up to half of people have it at some point in a year. Yet about 5% of sufferers have a stran…
Insulin resistance lets blood sugar look normal while the pancreas works overtimeInsulin resistance means the body's cells stop answering insulin's signal to pull sugar out of the blood. For a while the pancreas compensates by pumping out more, keeping glucose…
Who opened the first intensive care unit depends on whom you askIntensive care is often credited to Copenhagen in 1953, when Bjørn Aage Ibsen set up constant breathing support for polio patients. Yet in the United States, Dwight Harken is said…
Ibuprofen was born in a Boots lab in Nottingham in 1961One of the world's most familiar painkillers came out of a Boots research lab in Nottingham, where Stewart Adams and John Nicholson discovered it in 1961. First sold as Brufen, ib…
Medicine's master code list includes a code for being struck by a cowICD-10, the World Health Organization's catalogue of diseases, symptoms and injuries, took effect in 1993 with more than 14,000 codes. America's version ballooned to over 69,000 d…
ICD-11 bans the letters I and O so nobody mistakes them for digitsThe WHO's newest disease classification, ICD-11, took effect on 1 January 2022 after more than a decade of work by over 300 specialists from 55 countries. It holds about 85,000 en…
Pressure builds around the brain in this disorder, yet no cause is foundIdiopathic intracranial hypertension raises the pressure around the brain with no tumour or other detectable reason; its older name was pseudotumor cerebri. Nearly everyone affect…
Japan's modern navy rose from two centuries of banned ocean-going shipsFor more than 200 years from the 1640s, building an ocean-going ship in Japan was punishable by death. When American warships forced the country open in 1854, its fleet was badly …
Impetigo, the school-sores infection, touched about 140 million people in 2010Impetigo is a surface skin infection best known for honey-coloured crusts around a child's nose and mouth. It affected about 140 million people worldwide in 2010, most often child…
In situ: the Latin phrase used in more than 910,000 scientific papersIn situ simply means in the place, but the phrase does heavy lifting across science. It describes a probe sampling the Sun's atmosphere, concrete poured where the wall will stand,…
A Nobel-winning parasite drug started out protecting dogs from heartwormIvermectin was discovered in 1975 and first used by vets against heartworm and mites. Approved for people in 1987, it became a weapon against river blindness and other parasitic d…- Yellow eyes in jaundice are not really the whites of the eyesAbout 80 percent of newborns turn slightly yellow in their first week, yet jaundice in adults is rare and usually signals trouble with blood breakdown, the liver or the bile ducts…
John Adams defended the British soldiers of the Boston MassacreBefore he led a revolution, John Adams took the most unpopular case in Boston: defending British soldiers charged with murder after the Boston Massacre, and winning. He believed e…
The man who named Saturn's moons also invented the blueprintJohn Herschel gave seven of Saturn's moons the names astronomers still use, from Mimas to Iapetus. He also invented the cyanotype, the process behind blueprints, made a photograph…
Kambo rituals rub frog secretions into small burns, and Australia bans itKambo comes from the waxy skin secretion of the giant leaf frog, an Amazonian tree frog. In ceremonies, practitioners burn small spots on the arm or leg and dab the dried substanc…- Ketamine keeps patients breathing under anaesthesia, which made it a battlefield drugMost anaesthetics slow breathing and drop blood pressure. Ketamine does the opposite: patients keep their airway reflexes and their hearts are stimulated. That odd profile made it…
- An internist is not an intern, and not quite a family doctor eitherInternists are fully trained specialists in adult disease, the doctors called when symptoms such as fatigue, confusion or weight loss refuse to point at a single organ. The name c…
- Doctors first split strokes into leaks and plugs back in 1823A stroke is either a plug, where blood flow is blocked, or a leak, where a vessel bursts inside the brain. That distinction dates to 1823. The leaks, called intracerebral haemorrh…
- Most burst brain aneurysms are smaller than a centimetre acrossA brain aneurysm is a weak spot where an artery balloons outward. Many stay silent for life. When one tears, blood floods the space around the brain and brings on a thunderclap he…
- An early plastic IUD was moulded on cookie sheets in a kitchen ovenIn the late 1950s, Dr Jack Lippes and plastics developer Paul Bronnenkant heated and shaped plastic on cookie sheets in Bronnenkant's kitchen. The result, the Lippes Loop, became …
Doctors use lorazepam partly because it stops you remembering the procedureMost drugs list memory loss as a drawback. With lorazepam, sold as Ativan, it is sometimes the point: given before endoscopies or dental work, it calms patients and blocks memorie…- A dose of LSD can weigh one two-hundredth of a sand grainLSD is among the most potent mind-altering substances known: 20 micrograms, about a two-hundredth of a grain of sand, is enough to notice. Discovered by accident in 1943, banned w…
- Lupus is named after a wolf because of its facial rashMedieval physicians thought the facial rash of this disease looked like a wolf's bite, so in the 13th century they called it lupus. Today it is known as a great imitator: an autoi…
Kwashiorkor's name means the illness a child gets when a sibling arrivesA starving child with kwashiorkor can look plump, because the disease swells the feet, belly and face with fluid. One family feeding their child cassava took the swelling for good…
Neuroscientists still argue over which parts make up the limbic systemIn 1954 rats with electrodes in two small brain regions kept pressing a lever to stimulate them, over and over. Those regions belong to the limbic system, the brain's emotional an…
Limerick once ran its own soviet, printing money for twelve daysIn April 1919 striking workers in Limerick printed their own currency, fixed food prices and published newspapers, declaring a soviet against British military rule. It was one cha…
Fat removed by liposuction tends to come back, often around the organsLiposuction removes fat cells for good, yet within a few months total body fat usually drifts back to where it started, even with diet and exercise unchanged. Much of the regained…
Vyvanse does nothing until your blood chops off an amino acidLisdexamfetamine, sold as Vyvanse or Elvanse, is inert when swallowed. It is dextroamphetamine chemically bolted to the amino acid lysine, and enzymes in the blood must snip that …- The Master of Science began in Michigan in 1858 and now means different things everywhereThe University of Michigan awarded the first Master of Science in 1858. Today the degree can take one year or seven, may be earned by coursework, research or both, and in some cou…
The CIA once bought an entire supply of LSD to hunt for mind controlIn the early 1950s the CIA's chemist Sidney Gottlieb arranged to buy the whole available supply of LSD for $240,000. It fuelled MKUltra, a secret programme that ran from 1953 to 1…
One fraudulent paper about twelve children dented a vaccine given 575 million timesBy 2012 the MMR jab had been given some 575 million times, and measles deaths had fallen from about 2.6 million a year to 122,000. Then a single 1998 paper, later ruled dishonest …
A patch covering about 2 per cent of the retina commands half the visual cortexThe macula takes up only about 2.1 per cent of the retina, yet almost half of the brain's visual cortex handles what it sees. When age-related macular degeneration damages that ti…
Mammals are literally named after the gland that feeds their youngThe word mammal comes from the Latin mamma, meaning breast. Every mammal has mammary glands, but they vary wildly: platypus-like monotremes ooze milk from modified skin glands wit…- Why tuberculosis is never fought with a single drugA patient with extensive lung tuberculosis may carry around a trillion bacteria, enough that a few will already resist any one antibiotic. Hit them with several drugs at once and …
Your jawbone is the only bone in the skull you can actually moveLeave aside the tiny vibrating bones of the middle ear, and the mandible is the one part of the human skull that moves at will. It swings open and shut, slides sideways and pushes…