Forums → The Tavern → Your medical questions answered!
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In an effort to procrastinate doing everything...okay, really simply to revise my material for next semester when I start working at hospitals (but the first one sounds less dorky D
...anyway...
In an effort to revise my material, I'm inviting each and every one of you to ask any questions you had on the human body (and mind). As long as it's medical, it can be pretty much anything- and I'll attempt to answer it as quickly as possible, hopefully off the top of my head.
HAVE AT IT
- 327 Replies
@ morbid_giggle: That's the idea!
Though of course I should be clear- I'm not a doctor (M.D.) yet, and more importantly I'm not your doctor. I'm assuming I know what your toe looked like, but if you're still worried, make sure you have it checked out by somebody who can properly examine it!
@ Bigbowla: Got a photo? I might need a bit more detail, seeing as not to scare you, but that could be anything from a bruise + swelling to a polyp to a skin cancer to a wart.
Strop,
What causes warts? The kind on your hands, and also planters warts. Also, how do you get rid of them?
Oh, by the way, for my question I would like to hear every possible way. Not just one or two, because, chances are I have heard some already.
gman1000:
The answer to your question is deceptively simple. Warts are the result of a viral infection, and there's only one infectious agent that causes them- human papillomavirus (HPV). This virus is transmitted by contact, especially skin-skin contact.
Although HPV by definition attacks the human mucous membranes (like the insides of your eyelids and mouth and certain parts of the genitals) and skin, not all of the 130 or so types of HPV will cause warts, though. Different types of HPV will cause different types of wart on different areas, for example the common wart which is, evidently, very common, and the plantar wart which, as the name suggests, can only be found on the soles of the feet.
Interesting fact: about 30-40 types of HPV are transmitted via sexual activity, and one of the results of this is genital warts. However, other types of HPV, not the ones that cause warts, are called 'high-risk' because they place the infected person at risk of getting cancer. Every single case of cervical cancer is the result of HPV infection. Recently, the HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix were designed specifically to stop this. That is to say it is essentially a 'vaccine against cancer'.
i m jus askin cauz i m fat.... but wat is the average mass(kg) for boys aged 12?
@ octobokid95:
It's hard to tell you the average because I don't know where you come from- averages differ across countries and it's not a very meaningful statistic.
What might be of more help though is this. It's the standard growth chart that shows you how tall and how heavy you are compared to everybody else. According to the chart, the median (not the average) weight for a 12 year old boy is 40kg. This means that if you are 40kg, you are heavier than half all the other 12 year old boys.
This is still a loose measure. Things to consider are:
* Different people have different body compositions. Parts of you could be heavier, because different things (muscle, fat, bone, organs) have different weight.
* At 12 years old, a boy isn't expected to have undergone many (or any) of the significant physical changes in puberty. One common effect of puberty in boys is the dramatic shedding of extra fat that many children appear to carry, otherwise known as 'uppy fat'. Also, during puberty, males typically put on more muscle mass.
Therefore one's weight isn't necessarily an indication of how fat you are- it depends on at what stage of development you're at among other things. If you're 'chubby', but you're not carrying so much that it's bad for your health, I wouldn't necessarily be worried at this stage.
@ Carlie:
However, other types of HPV, not the ones that cause warts...
That should ease your mind a bit! But yes, you're correct. The HPV that gives you warts and the HPV that might give you cervical cancer are different types, with different modes of transmission.
The answer to your question is deceptively simple. Warts are the result of a viral infection, and there's only one infectious agent that causes them- human papillomavirus (HPV). This virus is transmitted by contact, especially skin-skin contact.
Not all forms cause cervical cancer though, right? I mean, a wart on your hand is not going to be related to the HPV protected by Gardasil, correct?
@ gman1000:
Oh yeah, you're right. I totally forgot, my bad.
Ways to get rid of warts
The recommended treatment really varies on the type of wart, but as a quick list:
* Remove it manually by cutting it out. Unless you like being scarred and possibly being in much pain, this isn't recommended.
* Freeze the wart off using liquid nitrogen. Commonly used for common warts, but not so much for facial, plantar and genital warts because of risk of scarring and discomfort (having your goolies frozen isn't something I'd recommend for fun!) Repeat treatments are usually required.
* Salicylic acid preparations. These usually come in the form of a pad that you place on the affected area and some sticking plaster on top. Treatment can take a few days to a few weeks, and care should be taken coz this stuff can burn!
* Softening the wart with water and covering with tape (duct tape, apparently, though try moleskin too) can sometimes work well on plantar warts.
* Immune system modulation. This is a newer approach that covers a range of things from injections, topical creams and materials that can induce blistering or activate various immune mechanisms to fight the infection more effectively.
I think that covers it. That last point is a varied bag, though.
@ Bigbowla532:
It's about as likely that you'd get warts from a toad peeing on you as the toad peeing on you caused your armatar to go missing :P
Zing!
That said I didn't even know that toads urinated, so yeah.
@ crazynaitor:
Why do we have a type of Gender?
...heavens, what a question. It's an excellent question but it's also another difficult one to answer! I'll try to be brief:
Gender is actually based on our common perceptions of sex. It's the set of expectations and values one associates with said sex- which, simply speaking, is male or female. The way we talk about sex and the way it has been defined as pretty much two halves is derived entirely from ourselves, though, given that many of the differences between 'male' and 'female' are directly observable by us, this is hardly surprising.
For humans, I guess it just so happened that we turned out to be sexually reproducing mammals that are almost entirely either male or female, and don't actually change sex by ourselves. That's about as deep as I can go, and after that it's a matter of working my way back:
Technically speaking, sex is actually defined by your genetic makeup. If you have a Y sex chromosome, you're male. If you only have X sex chromosomes, you're female. For about 99.9% of the population, there are two sex chromosomes and their configuration is either XY (male) or XX (female).
However not everybody is this way! While nobody can be YY (it just doesn't work out), various other combinations of X and Y exist where there is one or even two extra sex chromosomes, which can affect the phenotypic (physiological) presentation. Even though the presentation can be ambiguous, the definition I've given above still stands in a strict sense because they Y chromosome is known as the 'sex-determining chromosome'. Why? Because it contains the info that triggers the changes in the embryo that turn it into a male.
This brings me to sexual characteristics. Primary sexual characteristics are defined by your reproductive organs- usually either a vagina, uterus and ovaries (female) or a penis and testes (male). However, sometimes those chromosomes I mentioned above don't quite work as planned, or something else happens along the way and a hormone or messenger doesn't get the signal right. This can result in different outcomes where it's unclear whether a person is a male or a female or both (a shemale?) or neither, based on what's between their legs. Those who happen to have various extents of both sets of reproductive organs account for somewhere in the order of %0.001 (as an imprecise figure) of the world's population, which, when you think about it, is a fair bit.
Then there's the secondary sexual characteristics. These are the characteristics that most people would assess when glancing over a person- broad shoulders and a hairy chin? Breasts? Hips? Mannerisms? These have been generalised, perhaps too much, and aligned with the labels 'male' and 'female', and quite often associated with sexuality. It's this part that gives people the most confusion. It's still unclear as to what relation gender exactly holds with sex, seeing as there are many people who do not feel comfortable with their gender specifically, and others still who are not comfortable with their sex, to the extent that they either pretend, or adopt the roles and behaviors of the other sex, or have their sex changed. Mankind has a ways to go in figuring out how this all works.
In short, we have a type of gender because we have trends between the sexes that people as a whole see and judge upon. It's not necessarily correct, but it's what most people seem to think for the time being, until we can accept that exceptions to the rule do exist and this is perfectly natural.
I have these little tiny bumps on my lower leg (shin), its not all over my leg, but just in like a patch about 3 inches by 2 inches, there is no hair growing where the bumps are and also the area is a tad bit paler than the rest of my leg, the bumps aren't red and they don't itch or anything they are just there...can you please tell me what these annoying little bumps are???
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