CHAPTER 1

Medical Oddities

It's true that official death rates go down when doctors go on strike. Forexample, a recent doctors' strike in Israel saw death rates tumble by 39percent. Yes, some drop might have come because life-threatening operations werepostponed. But here's how to account for most of the drop: In reality, deathgoes on as normal; it's just that a strike postpones the filling out of deathrecords.

Arteries & Science

A study found that 1 out of 4 patients diagnosed with high blood pressure in adoctor's office has normal blood pressure when measured away from the doctor'soffice.

A healthy human's blood pressure is about the same as a spider's.

Licorice can raise your blood pressure.

The official name for that blood-pressure measuring cuff is a sphygmomanometer.

Light flickering at a rate of 10–30 blinks per second can stimulate epilepticseizures in some people. Children are most susceptible—the peak age is thirteen—andthree-quarters of the victims are boys.

Culprits have included cartoons, video games, TVs with bad vertical hold, discolights, and even the sun shining through Venetian blinds.

Anybody who has given up chocolate for tofu can completely understand this:Statistical studies in the 1990s indicated that lowering blood cholesterol,while healthy for the heart, appeared to correlate to depression and deaths fromsuicide, violence, and accidents.

If you work with pigs, you're more likely to have your appendix operated on: twoand a half times more likely if you're a pig farmer; four times if you're a pigbutcher. Pigs carry the Yersinia bacteria, which can cause both appendicitis anda harmless intestinal inflammation that closely mimics appendicitis. As aprecaution, doctors have had to operate either way, discovering only aftercutting open the body whether their pig-wrangling patients have diseasedappendixes or healthy ones.

Saints Preserve Us!

According to Catholic teaching, Saint Apollonia is the patron saint of dentists.Her claim to the job comes because an angry mob yanked out her teeth one by onein 249 C.E. when she refused to renounce Christianity.

Saint Harvey is the patron saint of optometrists, a little strange since he wasblind from birth and was never credited with any eye-related miracles.

Pick your disease and the Catholic Church has a patron saint for it. Here aresome you may wish to know about: Saint Acacius (headaches), Saint Cathal(hernias), Saint Giles (lameness, insanity, sterility, and epilepsy), SaintDrogo ("gravel in the urine"), Saint George (syphilis), Saint Catherine ofAlexandria (diseased tongues), Saint Lucy (eye diseases, dysentery, and"hemorrhages in general"), Saint Hilary of Poitiers ("backward children"), SaintServatus ("leg diseases"), and Saint Benedict (fever, inflammation, kidneydisease, and "temptations of the devil").

What's the "cape doctor"? A prevailing wind in the Cape of Good Hope that localshave long believed prevents illnesses by carrying germs out to sea.

At Tokyo's Kei University Hospital, 30 percent of patients diagnosed with throatpolyps claimed that karaoke singing was the cause.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that people are particularly irritablebetween 4 and 6 P.M. Here's one bit of statistical evidence: In hospitalemergency rooms, more human bites are treated during that two-hour time periodthan in any other.

Doctors in Fiji during World War II discovered that coconut milk can be used asan emergency substitute blood plasma and that coconut fiber works better thancatgut for stitching surgical incisions. But that's not all. Some South Pacificcoral is so nearly identical to human bone in mineral content and porosity thatit's been used by plastic surgeons to replace human bone.

Conflict of Interest: Before the 1930s, many ambulance services were operated byfuneral homes.

Much turn-of-the-twentieth-century silliness greeted the invention of the x-ray.Evangelists tried to find the soul with it. A professor tried to use x-rays totransmit anatomical drawings directly into his students' heads. New Jerseyconsidered a law to make it illegal to sell x-ray glasses designed for lookingthrough women's clothes. For added safety, a London clothes manufacturer did abrisk business in selling "x-ray-proof undergarments" to shy ladies.

God Bless You! June Clark was a Miami teenager who had sneezed continuously for155 days in a row. After several other approaches failed, they started givingher mild electric shocks each time she sneezed. For whatever reason, it stoppedher sneezing pretty quickly.

Einstein's Brain

Last time we checked, Albert Einstein's brain is still in Wichita with the manwho did his autopsy in 1955. Dr. Thomas Harvey mostly keeps it in a bottle inhis office, except for the occasional outing. For example, Harvey schlepped thebrain cross-country to visit Einstein's granddaughter in 1997, reunitinggenerations even after death.

Was Einstein's brain different from yours and mine? In the summer of 1999, agroup of scientists from McMaster University in Ontario borrowed the brain fromDr. Harvey and found that the inferior parietal region—the part of the brain that'sassociated with mathematics, visuals, and music—is 15 percent wider than mostpeople's brains.

If you define obesity as being thirty pounds or more over a healthy weight,Russia's people are the most obese people in the world (25.4 percent of theircitizens), followed closely by Mexico's (25.1 percent). The United States isn'tfar behind—about 20 percent, or 1 in 5.

Cutting & Pasting

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world's biggest gallbladder weighed twenty-three pounds and was removed from a sixty-nine-year-oldwoman in Maryland in 1989.

Who had the most medical operations in history? William Mcllroy of GreatBritain. In the fifty years before he moved into a retirement home in 1979,Mcllroy had an estimated 400 operations at a hundred different hospitals usingat least twenty-two different aliases. Doctors say he had an...