Intellect PlusHealth, medicine and disease
991 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 17.
Mania is not simply depression flipped upside downMania is often pictured as the cheerful opposite of depression, but the elevated mood can just as easily be irritable and miserable. Some people even feel depressive symptoms in t…
Swedish massage was named by a Dutchman, not invented by a SwedePehr Henrik Ling is often hailed as the father of massage and the inventor of the Swedish style. He wasn't. The phrase Swedish massage system was coined in 1868 by a Dutch practit…
The most drastic breast cancer operation turned out to save no extra livesThe first radical mastectomy, performed in 1882, stripped away the breast, the armpit lymph nodes and the chest muscles beneath. Later outcome studies found that for most tumours …
Naloxone can restart breathing after an opioid overdose within minutesPatented in 1961, naloxone knocks opioids off their receptors and can bring back breathing in two minutes when injected into a vein. Once a hospital drug, it now comes as a pocket…
Modafinil keeps pilots and astronauts awake, but does it make anyone smarter?Developed in France in the 1970s, modafinil is a first-line treatment for narcolepsy, flown aboard the International Space Station and used by several militaries instead of amphet…
The fuzz spoiling your bread also gave us penicillin, soy sauce and BrieMould is not a single kind of organism but a growth habit shared by thousands of fungal species. The same threads that rot fruit also ferment soy sauce, ripen blue cheese, protect…
Why mouth blisters turn into ulcers so quickly, and when one is worryingThe lining of your mouth sits at the border between gut and skin, and it is thinner than either, so the slightest scrape from a broken filling can open a sore. Most mouth ulcers a…- Moxibustion burns mugwort on the skin, and the evidence mostly goes up in smokeFor centuries healers across China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Mongolia have smouldered aged mugwort over chosen points on the body, aiming to warm the flow of qi. Portuguese missi…
Mpox was named after lab monkeys, though monkeys probably are not its sourceScientists first identified the virus in 1958 after pox-like outbreaks in research monkey colonies, so it was called monkeypox. Yet the likeliest natural hosts are small African m…
In myasthenia gravis, the body's antibodies jam the switch between nerve and muscleImagine eyelids that droop by evening and a smile that turns into a snarl. In myasthenia gravis the immune system blocks the receptors that let nerves tell muscles to contract, so…
Worldwide, the top cause of heart muscle inflammation is a parasite, not a virusIn Europe and North America, myocarditis usually follows a viral infection. Across the whole planet, though, the leading cause is Chagas disease, spread by a single-celled parasit…
Myrrh, the bitter tree resin once worth an Egyptian royal expeditionMyrrh starts as a wound. Slash the bark of certain thorny Commiphora trees and they bleed a waxy gum that hardens into glossy yellow lumps. Egyptian kings sent ships for it, Nabat…
Eclampsia needs a placenta, and ends when the placenta is goneEclampsia, the seizures that can strike pregnant women with pre-eclampsia, has a puzzling requirement: a placenta. Remove the placenta and the condition resolves. Its forerunner, …
A normal-looking scan does not rule out an ectopic pregnancyIn an ectopic pregnancy the embryo attaches somewhere outside the uterus. It affects fewer than 2 per cent of pregnancies, yet it accounts for roughly 6 to 13 per cent of deaths a…
Guinea worm fell from 3.5 million cases to 10, with no drug or vaccineIn 1986 an estimated 3.5 million people across 20 countries caught Guinea-worm disease. In 2025, just 10 human cases were reported worldwide. No vaccine or cure exists, so the col…
People have drowned in just 30 millimetres of waterLying face down, people have drowned in as little as 30 millimetres of water. Drowning is suffocation caused when the mouth and nose sit under liquid, and most fatal cases happen …
US overdose deaths fell sharply after peaking near 111,000 in 2022American overdose deaths climbed for two decades, peaking at around 110,900 in 2022. Then the curve bent. In the year to March 2025 the toll was about 77,600, still roughly 213 de…
DSM-5 folded Asperger syndrome into a single autism spectrumPublished by the American Psychiatric Association in 2013, the DSM-5 redrew several familiar lines in psychiatry. Asperger syndrome stopped being a separate diagnosis and joined a…
A hugely popular antidepressant whose measured benefit looks surprisingly smallDuloxetine, sold as Cymbalta, was the 31st most prescribed medicine in the United States in 2023, with more than 18 million prescriptions. Yet a 2025 systematic review found its a…
Some people with swallowing trouble inhale food without ever coughingDysphagia simply means difficulty swallowing, but it can be surprisingly hard to spot. Some people have little awareness of the problem, and some aspirate food or drink into the l…- Touching the chin can briefly switch off some dystonia spasmsDystonia makes muscles contract on their own, twisting the body into repetitive movements or fixed, abnormal postures. One of its oddest features is the sensory trick: a simple ge…
- Two Roman emperors died in York, and a third was proclaimed thereRoman York, called Eboracum, was far more than a fort. Septimius Severus died there in 211 AD and Constantius Chlorus in 306, whereupon troops in the fortress instantly hailed his…
The antihistamine in Benadryl can wind some people up instead of downDiphenhydramine, best known as Benadryl, is famous for making people drowsy, which is why it turns up in so many sleep aids. Yet in some users, especially at higher doses, it does…- Daydreaming and dissociative amnesia sit on the same psychological spectrumDrifting off in a dull meeting and losing all memory of who you are may look unrelated, but psychologists place both on one continuum called dissociation. What unites them is a pu…
Few psychiatric diagnoses are as disputed as dissociative identity disorderDiagnoses of multiple personality disorder soared to around 50,000 in North America by the 1990s, then collapsed amid lawsuits and retracted memories. Renamed dissociative identit…
Diverticulitis hurts on the left in Europe but usually on the right in AsiaSmall pouches in the wall of the large intestine are common in Western countries and rare in rural Africa. When they become inflamed, the result is diverticulitis. Oddly, where th…
An MD means a new doctor in America but a research degree in BritainIn the United States, MD is the degree every new physician earns. In the UK and Ireland, junior doctors graduate with a bachelor's in medicine and surgery, and the MD is a higher …
Nearly a third of American medical students now train for a DOIn the United States, doctors with DO after their names hold the same rights as MDs and train in the same residencies. As of 2026 almost 30 percent of American medical students ar…
A doctorate was originally a church-approved licence to teachDoctor means teacher in Latin, and the first doctorates were exactly that: permission to lecture at a medieval university. The church controlled who got one, charging fees and dem…
Doctors diagnose by elimination, treating each possible disease as a hypothesisWhen a patient arrives with a cough, a clinician does not jump straight to an answer. They draw up a list of conditions that could produce the same signs, rank them by likelihood …
In diffuse axonal injury, most damage unfolds hours to days after impactIt was long assumed that brain fibres snap at the moment of a violent jolt. Researchers now think most axons in diffuse axonal injury are not torn on impact at all. Instead, chemi…
Foxgloves have nothing to do with foxes' paws, whatever folklore saysA popular tale claims foxes slipped foxglove flowers onto their feet to creep up on prey. The truth is plainer: the Old English name was simply fox's glove, and the botanical name…
Delirium strikes most people in intensive care, yet is often mistaken for madnessOnly 1 to 2 percent of people have delirium at any given time, yet it affects 81 percent of patients in intensive care. This sudden confusion is a sign that the body is under phys…
Ringworm has nothing to do with wormsThe red, scaly ring on the skin looks as if something is burrowing underneath, hence the name ringworm. The real culprit is a fungus, one of about 40 species, and at any moment up…
Dyspraxia affects about one in twenty people and has nothing to do with intelligenceTying shoelaces, catching a ball, writing neatly: for roughly 5 percent of people these everyday skills stay stubbornly hard. Developmental coordination disorder, also called dysp…
One cheap steroid treats croup, swollen brains and puffy wisdom-tooth cheeksDexamethasone turns up in a startling range of places: a single dose for a child with croup, eye drops after surgery, an injection before wisdom teeth come out, and treatment for …- Psychiatry's most famous rulebook began partly as an army manualThe DSM decides, in practice, what counts as a mental disorder in the United States, and insurers often demand one of its codes before paying. Yet it grew out of census tallies, a…
In 1978 Americans got through more than 2 billion Valium tabletsValium was America's best-selling medicine for fifteen years, from 1968 to 1982, and in 1978 alone more than 2 billion tablets were sold. The same drug, diazepam, still calms seiz…- The everyday painkiller Britain moved behind the pharmacy counterDiclofenac, familiar as Voltaren gel and tablets, eases arthritis, migraines, kidney stones and sprains, and Americans filled more than 9 million prescriptions for it in 2023. Yet…
Boston got the credit for ether anaesthesia, but Georgia got there firstOn October 16, 1846, William Morton put a patient under with ether in a Boston hall now called the Ether Dome, and surgery changed forever. But a Georgia doctor, Crawford Long, ha…- A defibrillator cannot restart a flatlined heart, whatever television suggestsOn screen, a shock jolts a flatlining patient back to life. In reality, defibrillation works only on specific chaotic rhythms, such as ventricular fibrillation, and does nothing f…
- The virus named for giant cells carries one of the longest human-virus genomesCytomegalovirus takes its name from Greek words for a big container, after the swollen cells a German pathologist spotted in an infant in 1881. Its human strain packs roughly 235,…
- Michael Jackson's Dangerous began life as a greatest-hits packageAfter Bad, Michael Jackson dropped Quincy Jones to prove he could succeed alone. What started as a hits compilation called Decade grew into Dangerous, a $10 million gamble built w…
- David Cone threw a perfect game on the day Yogi Berra came homeOn July 18, 1999, with Don Larsen and Yogi Berra in the ballpark, David Cone pitched the sixteenth perfect game in baseball history. Larsen and Berra, the battery behind the 1956 …
- A hundred degrees of difference turned cocaine into a smokable crisisPowdered cocaine is a salt that burns uselessly in a flame, but its freebase form, crack, vaporises near 90 °C. That chemical quirk delivers effects within seconds, a high lasting…
- A misfolded protein that teaches its neighbours to misfoldCreutzfeldt–Jakob disease has no germ in the usual sense. A misshapen prion protein bends healthy copies into its own faulty form, a chain reaction that riddles the brain with tin…
- Crohn's disease can reach from the mouth to the eyes and kidneysCrohn's disease is usually pictured as a gut disorder, but its inflammation can travel. Chemical signals made in the bowel reach the eyes, bile problems raise the odds of gallston…
- The seal-like bark of croup once signalled a deadly diseaseCroup's cough is often compared to a sea lion's call, and about 15 percent of children get it at some point. Today it is usually a mild viral illness that clears in a day or two, …
A CT scanner builds body slices from thousands of X-ray anglesA CT scanner spins an X-ray tube around the body, measures how much each tissue absorbs, then lets a computer reconstruct virtual slices. The idea earned Godfrey Hounsfield and Al…
Cyanide suffocates cells even while the blood stays full of oxygenCyanide does not stop you breathing air; it stops your cells using it. By jamming a key enzyme in the mitochondria, it leaves oxygen stranded in the blood, which is why victims ca…- Cystic fibrosis is named after cysts, yet involves noneA cyst is a sealed pouch whose wall is built from cells that look and behave unlike their neighbours. It may hold air, fluid or something semi-solid, and it can vanish on its own.…
The wartime committee that ran revolutionary France and then devoured its ownCreated in April 1793 to defend a young republic besieged by foreign armies and internal revolt, the Committee of Public Safety swelled into France's real government. It mobilised…- Comorbidity sounds precise, yet psychiatry may be using the word wronglyWhen a patient has two or more conditions at once, doctors call it comorbidity. The term dates only from 1970, and critics argue it can mislead: in psychiatry, apparently separate…
A burn scar is not a complication, and doctors care about the differenceIn medicine a complication is an unwelcome turn: a disease or a treatment makes things worse or sparks new problems elsewhere in the body. It is distinct from a sequela, the lasti…
Most workplace skin disease comes from what touches the skinContact dermatitis accounts for somewhere between 90 and 95 percent of occupational skin disorders. Four in five cases come not from allergy but from plain irritation, as water, s…
The world's leading killer often announces itself first with a heart attackCoronary artery disease caused 8.9 million deaths in 2015, about 15.6 percent of all deaths worldwide, more than any other condition. Fatty plaques slowly narrow the heart's own a…
Vaccines once took years; COVID-19 shots arrived in months after decades of groundworkNo vaccine for an infectious disease had ever been produced in under several years, and no human coronavirus vaccine existed at all. Yet COVID-19 trials began in March 2020, and b…- Why 20 kelvin is twice 10 kelvin, but Celsius can't make that claimThe coefficient of variation divides a data set's standard deviation by its mean, turning spread into a pure, unitless ratio. That makes it ideal for comparing wildly different me…
- Many people with coeliac disease feel fine until gluten leaves their dietCoeliac disease is an autoimmune reaction to gluten, the protein in wheat, barley and rye, and it affects somewhere between 1 in 200 and 1 in 50 people. Plenty of them go undiagno…
Modern talking therapy traces its roots to Stoic philosophers and Pavlov's dogsCognitive behavioural therapy works on a simple premise: distorted thinking and unhelpful habits keep many psychological problems going, so changing them can ease symptoms. It gre…