13 Medical Facts You Probably Dont Know

1. Drug Companies Persuade Doctors to Boost Sales.

Drugs companies pay tens of millions of dollars every year for doctors to give speeches or lectures about specific pharmaceuticals, even flying physicians from city to city for dinner meetings with other doctors, encouraging them to increase the amount of prescriptions they write for the company’s product. Pharmaceutical sales representatives monitor the amount of prescriptions written through available medical databases. This allows them to track doctor behavior while persuading them to prescribe as much of their company’s medicine as possible.

 

2. For every pound of fat gained, you add seven miles of new blood vessels.

New tissue needs blood supply, so your vascular system expands to accommodate it. This also means your heart must work harder to pump blood through the new network, which may reduce oxygenation and nutrient replenishment in other tissues. Lose a pound? Your body will break down and reabsorb the unneeded blood vessels from the previous tissue.

3. The human brain cell can hold 5 time as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Scientists have yet to settle on a definitive amount, but the storage capacity of the brain in electronic terms is thought to be between 3 or even 1,000 terabytes. The National Archives of Britain, containing over 900 years of history, only takes up 70 terabytes, making your brain’s memory power pretty darn impressive.

4. .Fingernails grows nearly 4 times faster than toe nails.

If you notice that you’re trimming your fingernails much more frequently than your toenails you’re not just imagining it. The nails that get the most exposure and are used most frequently grow the fastest. On average, nails on both the toes and fingers grow about one-tenth of an inch each month.

5. You could remove a large part of your internal organs and survive.

The human body may appear fragile but it’s possible to survive even with the removal of the stomach, the spleen, 75 percent of the liver, 80 percent of the intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from the pelvic and groin area. You might not feel too great, but the missing organs wouldn’t kill you.

6. On any given day, sexual intercourse takes place over 120 million times on earth.

Humans are a quickly proliferating species, and with about 4% of the world’s population having sex on any given day, it’s no wonder that birth rates continue to increase in many places all over the world.

7. Over 90% of diseases are caused or complicated by stress.

That high stress job you have could be doing more than just wearing you down each day. It could also be increasing your chances of having a variety of serious medical conditions like depression, high blood pressure and heart disease.

8. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown.

Unless you’re trying to give your face a bit of a workout, smiling is a much easier option for most of us. Anyone who’s ever scowled, squinted or frowned for a long period of time knows how it tries out the face which doesn’t do a thing to improve your mood.

9. We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening.

The cartilage between our bones gets compressed by standing, sitting and other daily activities as the day goes on, making us just a little shorter at the end of the day than at the beginning.

10. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.

If you’ve ever chipped a tooth you know just how sadly true this one is. The outer layer of the tooth is enamel which is not a living tissue. Since it’s not alive, it can’t repair itself, leaving your dentist to do the work instead.

11. It is not possible to tickle yourself.

 Even the most ticklish among us do not have the ability to tickle ourselves. The reason behind this is that your brain predicts the tickle from information it already has, like how your fingers are moving. Because it knows and can feel where the tickle is coming from, your brain doesn’t respond in the same way as it would if someone else was doing the tickling.

12. The width of your arm span stretched out is the length of your whole body.

While not exact down to the last millimeter, your arm span is a pretty good estimator of your height.

13. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.

This doesn’t have a genetic basis, but is largely due to the fact that a majority of the machines and tools we use on a daily basis are designed for those who are right handed, making them somewhat dangerous for lefties to use and resulting in thousands of accidents and deaths each year.