Latest news with #scurvy
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
31 Horrifying Facts I Learned Against My Will And Now You Have To Suffer With Me
Fun facts should be entertaining, but some are downright disturbing. On the popular subreddit r/AskReddit, Reddit user u/MaterialRub675 asked people: What's a disturbing fact you wish you could unlearn? Some of these answers made me feel like I watched that cursed video in The Ring, and now all these facts will happen to me in the coming week. Read at your own risk: 1."We got a dog that had heartworms. They got treated and are doing perfectly fine now. The thing is, it prompted me to look into them. They're spread by mosquitoes and can live in most large mammals. Huh... So, what stops humans from getting them? Nothing. The answer is nothing. They just aren't harmful to humans because they can't breed properly in us. You and I might have a few right now... And that goes for most parasitic worms, btw." —u/summonsays 2."A dingo really did eat that woman's baby, and everyone still just makes fun of her to this day. Put your phone down and sit in silence for thirty seconds while you imagine what it would be like to: 1) be eaten alive by a dingo, and 2) find out what happened to your baby, have nobody believe you, and become an international laughingstock. What the f*ck, guys." —u/Dykeout 3."Scurvy makes scars reopen." —u/order66me Related: 4."When I had open heart surgery nearly 20 years ago at age 28, the doctors placed 'pacer' wires in my heart just in case they needed to stimulate my heart electrically after the surgery (my words, not theirs). So I wake up and find two yellow copper electrical wires protruding from my torso. Later that day, the nurse came to remove them. This is done by simply tugging until they come free from small hooks or barbs on the end of the heart wall. The nurse warned me that I'd feel my heart physically pull down in my body. She was not kidding. It was unpleasant, to say the least. But now, years later, I literally can't forget what it feels like to have someone tug on my heartstrings." —u/daveescaped 5."Dominant female meerkats will kill the pups of subordinate female meerkats, then force the subordinate females to feed their babies as 'tribute' or 'rent' to be allowed to remain in the group. That shit is hardcore af." —u/pyroskunkz 6."The whistle of an artillery or mortar shell falling towards you is actually the deviation from its trajectory and where you're currently standing. The closer you are to where it'll land, the less you hear. If it's a direct hit, you won't hear anything at all." —u/Gr0zzz 7."Children under the age of five try to hide from fires and not run from them." —u/user 8."There's a condition called Cotard's Delusion, where a person genuinely believes they're dead, like fully dead, but their body just hasn't noticed yet. Some even stop eating or ask to be buried. The mind is terrifying when it breaks." —u/LinaBreezeOh 9."Everything about rabies, especially the fact that once symptoms show, it's already too late." —u/WormWithKnowledge 10."It was believed for a long time that babies do not feel pain and no anesthesia is required when a surgery is performed. This only started to change in the late 1980s after the mom of an infant who underwent open heart surgery without anesthesia started a campaign to raise awareness. Whenever I think of it and imagine those poor babies who had to go through excruciating pain with a muscle relaxant that prevented them from moving and fighting back, on top of that...I'm in tears. I don't understand how medical professionals could have subjected them to such horror." —u/otis91 11."Centipedes let their young feed on their bodies and die while the babies just have a feast on their mother's corpse." —u/PreparationAlive9435 Related: 12."People don't die immediately when you cut their throat like in the movies." —u/kadir7 13."Lots of creatures eat their newborn if there isn't enough resources to go around. At age twelve, I learned this by discovering the small, half-severed pink bodies of hamster pups while changing their mom's cage litter. Apparently, she wasn't just a cuddly, soft, huggable ball of fur." —u/kravechocolate 14."Once I read that as a research project, someone put a fake turtle in the road to observe driver behavior, and something like 6% of people deliberately went out of their way to hit the turtle." —u/Academic_Dream_5569 15."The youngest mother ever confirmed was four years old when she got pregnant and five when she gave birth." —u/Moritani 16."When the Soviet Union launched the street dog Laika into space before launching a man, they had no intention of bringing the pup home alive. Although they provided food and water, they hadn't planned for her to return to Earth. She lived a few hours and likely died from heat-related stress. The capsule orbited for a few weeks until our atmosphere and gravity dragged it back in, burning up during re-entry. This has always been a sad story to me since the day I learned it long ago." —u/OGrinderBoy Related: 17."The number of women who have experienced traumatic brain injury (TBI) due to domestic violence is estimated to be 11-12 times greater than the number of TBIs experienced by all military personnel and athletes combined." —u/SkydivingAstronaut 18."How much of modern medicine relies on a hunch or trial and error. Before I worked in a hospital, I used to think doctors knew everything and that curing illness was straightforward. That will apply to some diseases, but there are many more that are vague, and treatment isn't well established or doesn't always respond as expected. Makes you afraid to get sick after a while." —u/Three_hrs_later 19."Untreated dental infections can lead to abscesses on the brain that result in a brain injury. A 40-year-old guy went from bad teeth to paraplegia and brain injury, from living a normal life into a group home on government benefits." —u/the_town_bike 20."Most of the Challenger crew were conscious for the entire 2-minute fall back to earth; they even put on their emergency oxygen masks..." —u/vinny876 21."Basically, every scene in movies where someone dies in lava is wrong. Your body is 80% water, and molten magma or lava is just rock that's so hot that it's in a liquid state. Rock is a lot denser than water, even in a liquid state so that you wouldn't sink into it: your body would float on the surface of the lava, burning to a crisp while you scream in agony. It might be even worse, given that when water (i.e., the water in every one of your cells) is suddenly exposed to extreme temperatures all at once, it instantly boils. If that exposure is fast enough, it boils explosively. And since your body isn't a perfect sphere being exposed to the +800 °C lava all at the same time, what (might) happen could be parts of your body exploding and popping as little steam explosions rupture your burned skin as you burn alive, floating on the superheated rock smoothie." —u/Rekthor 22."There is a kind of tumor (Teratoma) that can have hair, teeth, and even eye tissue." —u/TheBassMeister "I see you've met my ex." —u/midnightsunofabitch 23."How bad a decomposed body smells." —u/UnfilteredLan 24."All the foods that make me feel good are killing my body. WTF kinda nonsense 'truth' is that? I know why, but I disagree." —u/Wonderful_Sorbet_546 Related: 25."You can live with one lung, one kidney, and half your liver." —u/External-Lab4739 26."How much pain a damaged nerve near the spine can output." —u/NoctustheOwl55 27."Coffin Births. When someone pregnant dies, as gases build up in the body from decay, it can push a baby out. I think the first records of this happened in Pompeii." —u/ImaginationLord 28."I noticed some spots on my puppy's eyeballs two weeks ago. I took her to a dog ophthalmologist. It turns out they are diamonds, which are 'stray' skin cells that are growing where skin shouldn't. That's not the worst part. There's a hair growing out of one of the cells. My puppy's eyeball is growing hair." —u/mitchade 29."According to organizations like the International Labour Organization and the Walk Free Foundation, an estimated 28 million people are living in modern slavery, including forced labor, human trafficking, debt bondage, and forced marriage. It's unsettling because it highlights how widespread and invisible these systems can be, even in supposedly advanced societies. Once you know, you start seeing the signs in supply chains, industries, and global economics." —u/Potential-Mammoth-47 30."Your organs moving around make sounds that your brain just cancels out." —u/miiidnightrxbia finally, "Echidnas have four penis heads coming from one shaft. Four. Why the hell do they need four?" —u/astroboy_astronomy What's a disturbing fact you wish you could unlearn? Comment below! Do you love all things scary, dark, and creepy? Subscribe to the That Got Dark newsletter to get your weekly dopamine fix of the macabre delivered RIGHT to your inbox! Also in Internet Finds: Also in Internet Finds: Also in Internet Finds: Solve the daily Crossword
Medscape
23-06-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Vitamin C Does Nothing for the Common Cold
This transcript has been edited for clarity. If you aren't a 19th century British sailor, then you need to watch this video because — spoiler alert — vitamin C won't keep you from getting sick. I'm Dr Christopher Labos for Medscape, and this is On Second Thought . If you were blockading the continent during the Napoleonic Wars, then squirting some lemon juice into your beer probably made the difference between your teeth falling out and your teeth not falling out. There were a lot of ways to die if you were a British sailor during the Napoleonic Wars and, amazingly, French guns were not in the top three! The discovery of how to prevent scurvy with vitamin C is a great medical detective story, and I highly recommend Stephen Bown's book, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail . But if your idea of sailing is taking the IKEA ferry — by the way, it's free and gives you a great view of the Statue of Liberty — then scurvy is probably not your biggest problem. You probably take vitamin C because someone told you it prevents the common cold, and that person was probably Linus Pauling. Now, Linus Pauling was a very smart guy. He won two unrelated Nobel Prizes and, as far as I know, I haven't won any. So, when he wrote a book called Vitamin C and the Common Cold , people listened. And for some reason they don't seem to listen to me… Please follow me on X or Bluesky; social media is how I measure my self-worth. In the book, he told people to take 3000 mg of vitamin C every day to live longer and healthier. He predicted vitamin C would eliminate the common cold and extend the human lifespan. In interviews, he claimed that people who took optimum amounts of vitamins and supplements would live 25-35 years longer and would be free of diseases. Now, clearly the work of Nobel laureates needs to be taken seriously. But there is a condition called "Nobel disease" where, basically, you win a Nobel Prize and you think you're an expert in everything, and then subsequently go a little bit crazy and believe all kinds of nutty stuff. For example, Charles Richet won the 1913 Nobel Prize in Medicine and he believed in ghosts and telepathy; Pierre Curie attended seances; and a surprisingly large number of Nobel laureates became eugenicists. And then there was Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Well, if you didn't know about that one, Google "Kary Mullis and fluorescent talking raccoon." You heard me: fluorescent talking raccoon. I'll wait here. Now, Linus Pauling was not any of these things, although he did say people with sickle cell trait should get a tattoo on their forehead so nobody accidentally had babies with them. And he also said some stuff about aborting babies with sickle cell disease. So… eugenics light, maybe? But to be fair, a lot of people in the 1930s held similar views, and it's unclear how much the general public in the US really knew about what was going on in Germany. But... This was in 1968?! Jesus! Okay, never mind about that. So anyway, being a Nobel laureate doesn't make everything you say inherently right. Let's do some math. Does vitamin C prevent the common cold? Because we aren't doing the cancer stuff; I get too much hate mail as it is. Okay, fine: Vitamin C doesn't treat cancer. There! I said it! Alright? Everybody happy? I said it! But let's do the cold and flu stuff because there's an important lesson here. Does vitamin C prevent the common cold? To answer this question, I'm going to be using the data from the 2013 Cochrane review titled "Vitamin C for Preventing and Treating the Common Cold." It summarized 29 trials, including 11,306 participants, and is one of the most misquoted Cochrane reviews I have ever seen. Let's start with treatment. Does taking vitamin C when you get sick make you better? No . There were 10 studies that looked at this question, and these were people taking vitamin C when their symptoms started. It made no difference in symptom duration or severity. If you start taking vitamin C at the onset of symptoms, it does nothing. So, if you're somebody who starts popping vitamin C tablets when you get sick, this Cochrane review does not support that practice. The commercials and celebrity endorsements are lying to you. The only reason the marketing geniuses behind vitamin C can say anything positive is because there's another way to take vitamin C — and no, I don't mean as a suppository. You can take it as a regular supplement every day of your life, which is great for capitalism but inconvenient for you as a healthcare user. So then the question becomes, if you take vitamin C every day of your life as a regular supplementation strategy, will that prevent you from getting sick? Also no . The incidence of common colds is not reduced in the general population with regular vitamin C supplementation. It says that very clearly in the review. The only benefit observed in the 2013 review was vitamin C's effect on symptom duration. If you take vitamin C every day of your life, when you get sick — and you will still get sick the same number of times —your symptoms will go away faster. How much faster, you ask? I'm glad you did. According to this analysis, it reduces cold symptom duration by 7.7% on average. And what does that mean? Well, let's assume your cold lasts for 5 days. That is 120 hours for those of us living on planet Earth. If we take the vitamin C meta-analysis at face value, your cold will go away 9 hours faster. You're spending $30 a month (or $360 a year) for 9 hours of symptom relief. I'm not sure that's cost-effective. So, if that's the case, why do people claim that vitamin C can prevent the common cold? Well, welcome to the wonderful world of subgroup analysis — it's kind of nuts here! If you limit the Cochrane review to the five studies that tested vitamin C in periods of short-term physical stress or cold temperatures, that's where you see a benefit. Let's break that down. Three studies tested the effect of vitamin C among ultramarathon runners in South Africa, so that was the short-term physical stress part — because running a marathon is bad enough, but running an ultramarathon is incrementally worse. The cold temperatures (which made up the bulk of this subgroup) were examined in two studies. The first study observed Canadian soldiers on military maneuvers, because, as you know, Canada's a freezing wasteland and I ride my moose to work every day at my igloo medical clinic. The other study (which is where the bulk of the cold temperature patients came from) involved skiers. You might think, Okay, these were Olympic skiers enduring high-stress and cold-weather environments . But surprisingly, no. It was a study of children attending a ski school in Switzerland, which actually sounds like a pretty good vacation and I assume cocoa was involved. What's often left out of this discussion is the fact that other, longer-duration studies, like one in US Marines and another one in kids attending swim schools, didn't show a benefit . So, you really have to pick and choose to see a signal here. In the general population, there's no benefit — only in this very eclectic and specific subgroup of patients. If you know something about statistics, you know how dangerous subgroup analysis can be. Cut up the data into ever thinner salami slices and you can find some wild and ludicrous results. Remember the ISIS-2 trial? It showed that aspirin efficacy post-myocardial infarction varied by astrological sign. That's the quintessential example of how multiple-hypothesis testing can generate spurious results. Random chance is a major factor in life. Random chance is why you can use real data to show that the divorce rate in the UK correlates with the number of movies that Disney has released in any given year. Go data dredging and you can find any association if you torture the data enough. Overall, vitamin C does nothing for the common cold. Even at the most forgiving, it shortens symptoms by a few hours, which I think is just spurious given the incredible heterogeneity in the published research. But if you ignore all that, you only see a clinically meaningful difference if you're a South African ultramarathoner, a Canadian soldier, or a child attending a ski school in Switzerland. And you're probably none of those things — just like you're not a 19th century British sailor.
RNZ News
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
BONUS Kelly Tarlton's Final Treasure Hunt
history Northland about 1 hour ago Presenting a new RNZ podcast: Kelly Tartlon's Final Treasure Hunt. This story has everything! Kidnapping, smuggling, scurvy, and imaginary islands full of Jewish gold... Make sure to follow Kelly Tarlton's Final Treasure Hunt wherever you get your podcasts.
