Forums → The Tavern → Your medical questions answered!
| 327 | 54279 |
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
Ahhh ok! I just saw them yesterday, but it was near a light, so that might have been it. It just doesn't normally happen to me. Of course, I have been looking at computer screens a lot because my research paper is due today... Eeeep! I better get outta here! What am I doing in the forums?!!?
PS: Is shortsighted when you have trouble seeing up close? Or seeing things far away? Because my eyesight is getting slightly worse, and it is with things farther away. Is that shortsighted or nearsighted?
My brother sometimes gets these pains in his chest, near his rips. If he breths normal or deeply it hurts him like crazy. They go away eventually. What is this?
Strop said: If this is the case, then ordinarily it will go away with time. But just to clarify: this is just a single patch on one leg? It hasn't changed at all over the past year? And does the skin in the area feel any different- harder or scaly, for example?
Yes, it is just a single patch on one leg, no it hasn't changed at all, the only difference is that when i run my hand over it, it just feels bumpy as opposed to the surrounding skin with no bumps just feels smooth, not scaly or hard.
Carlie wrote:
Ahhh ok! I just saw them yesterday, but it was near a light, so that might have been it. It just doesn't normally happen to me. Of course, I have been looking at computer screens a lot because my research paper is due today... Eeeep! I better get outta here! What am I doing in the forums?!!?
PS: Is shortsighted when you have trouble seeing up close? Or seeing things far away? Because my eyesight is getting slightly worse, and it is with things farther away. Is that shortsighted or nearsighted?
1) Yes, it usually only happens when there's a good amount of open light otherwise there's just not enough refraction-vs-direct light to notice.
2) It doesn't happen very much at all, normally, just often enough for people to ask 'wth is up with that!?'.
3) You tell me :P My paper is due next Friday and I'm still here too.
4) Shortsightedness (myopia) is difficulty seeing things far away. Or even everywhere except close to you, depending on the nature of the cause and its severity. Most commonly changes in sight are some form of refractive error i.e. the lens isn't either in the right position or shape to do its job properly so light isn't focused when it hits the retina at certain distances.
Shortsightedness is synonymous with nearsightedness. The opposite is long sightedness, otherwise known as farsightedness or hyperopia. There are many factors that influence how your eyesight changes as you grow up and older, a major one being heredity (and therefore to an extent ethnicity).
Yes, it is just a single patch on one leg, no it hasn't changed at all, the only difference is that when i run my hand over it, it just feels bumpy as opposed to the surrounding skin with no bumps just feels smooth, not scaly or hard.
This suggests to me that if this was the result of some kind of inflammation or specific pathology, it wasn't severe. The alternative is that somehow you scraped the area (e.g. carpet burn) and this is how it healed. It's also possible that you didn't notice this patch until the surrounding area grew more hair.
The other option here is that there was no external cause, just in this area things 'happened differently'. Hair patterns can be a curious thing in that sometimes changes in specific spots and circumstances can cause things like patches of excess or absence of hair. I'm not entirely sure there's a real difference in skin texture here given that you've got hair on it and that's going to change the sensation.
Either way, have you asked a local doctor who can examine the area? My bet is that they most likely said 'nothing to worry about!' hoping that you'd leave it at that :P But they might be able to give you a better picture than I can from here.
ok....
Is there really a device in Hospitals for removing 8 Balls from people mouths? I have heard that you can get one in, but not out. Is this true?
KingRyan
K
Why sometimes when I'm running through a rough patch of weeds and get scraped sometimes don't feel/notice the pain until I look or itch it?
Ok, I have a couple.
My extremities have a habit of going numb after relatively short times when elevated/bent. Examples are: sitting in a chair which which may be a little short for me, legs start to go numb in 10 minutes(same for being elevated near waist); arm being hung behind me while I am sitting in a chair, starts to go numb in 5 minutes.
Do I just have horrid circulation? Because my hands and feet are always cold to the touch.
Next one: Every so often I will feel twinges of pain on the side of chest and my right arm will start to tingle. Both go away in a minute or so after starting. I know what those are normally signs of, but never heard of it happening every so often and going away.
Side note: Heart problems run in both sides of my family. Go shoddy genetics.
Last one: Would any permanent, noticeable damage be done by..oh say...somehow driving a knuckle on the hand back roughly 1.5 centimeters? Just out of curiosity, of course.^_^
And by knuckles I means the bony part right on the top of the back of your hand where the fingers end. It eventually migrates right back where it should be.
@ gman1000:
My brother sometimes gets these pains in his chest, near his ribs. If he breths normal or deeply it hurts him like crazy. They go away eventually. What is this?
The first thing to do is to exclude the possibility of cardiac issues, including angina, coronary artery obstruction and simply speaking, a heart attack.
The danger signs to watch out for in this respect is nausea, sweating, feeling clammy and also having short breath. However, this isn't so common and given your description it's highly unlikely this is the case.
Much more common are muscular spasms- which occasionally happen to most people. It just so happens that when you get them in the chest area it hurts, but this shouldn't indicate anything serious.
There are all kinds of theories about what brings these spasms about, from stress to the toxic effect from living in polluted urban environments but nothing particularly specific or causative has really surfaced.
KingRyan asked:
Is there really a device in Hospitals for removing 8 Balls from people mouths? I have heard that you can get one in, but not out. Is this true?
A single device specifically for removing 8 balls, I don't know! I'm pretty sure there are a range of options, but the important thing would be to make sure somebody can actually relax before attempting removal.
It's certainly much easier to get an 8-ball in than it is out for this reason: when getting the ball in, your mouth doesn't have anything in it. This means that there are no signals to your brain to activate any of the reflexes that accompany putting stuff into your mouth (usually to eat!) and your mandibular muscles are in their resting state.
However, when that 8-ball is in the mouth, your muscles are already stretched so there is tension, and there are little spindles that certain nerves connect to that detect this. Generally, when you have stuff in your mouth, the reflex is to produce saliva and to chew, so that food has the right shape and consistency to be swallowed. An 8-ball obviously cannot be chewed or broken down in any way, so your muscles are adding that additional tension for nothing! Not only that, but it makes it harder to overcome.
The sensation then can cause a person to panic somewhat, leading to further tensing up, by which point it becomes entirely impossible to remove said 8-ball from mouth. Furthermore, the mandibular muscles would start to fatigue, causing pain and cramps which heightens panic because the ball is still stuck!
I'm sure some people have managed to overcome both this panic and this reflex as there have been documented cases of people asphyxiating from accidentally swallowing cue balls, one of which happened in the course of a routine pub trick of inserting and removing a cue ball into the mouth, that said person reportedly performed on a routine basis!
Girl_Power asked:
How do you heal scabs?
Scabs in themselves are the result and an indication of the healing process! They consist of a mixture of dead blood cells and the products of platelets that cement them into place, which then dries up into a hard shell.
Scabs therefore protect the underlying surface from infection and interference with the healing process of the underlying tissues. So there's no need to heal scabs- it's best to wait until they drop off on their own. It's true that scabs generally itch and produce other annoying sensations especially if the skin in the area moves around a lot (like at a joint), but picking at a scab will generally slow healing and increase the likelihood of scarring!
DivineDarkness asked:
Why sometimes when I'm running through a rough patch of weeds and get scraped sometimes don't feel/notice the pain until I look or itch it?
The simple answer is that if something doesn't catch our attention, we often don't attribute anything to it!
But this merits a little more detail. The nervous system doesn't actually sense pain, the relevant pathway is that of nociception, which is to say, detection of damage! Pain is the perception of the sense of nociception, after the signal has traveled through the nerve and up the spine into the brain and been processed.
While running through the grass etc., your body may be preoccupied with other things, and you may have adrenalin (which Americans also call epinephrine for some reason I don't know...) pumping through your blood, which essentially prioritises your functions towards fight-or-flight actions and less towards things like: "ouch, that grass whipping my legs really hurts!" After your adrenalin levels drop, though, you're much more likely to notice because your attention is on it and also your body is no longer prioritising to the exclusion of other inputs.
Devoidless asked:
My extremities have a habit of going numb after relatively short times when elevated/bent. Examples are: sitting in a chair which which may be a little short for me, legs start to go numb in 10 minutes(same for being elevated near waist); arm being hung behind me while I am sitting in a chair, starts to go numb in 5 minutes.
Do I just have horrid circulation? Because my hands and feet are always cold to the touch.
Next one: Every so often I will feel twinges of pain on the side of chest and my right arm will start to tingle. Both go away in a minute or so after starting. I know what those are normally signs of, but never heard of it happening every so often and going away.
Side note: Heart problems run in both sides of my family. Go shoddy genetics.
Last one: Would any permanent, noticeable damage be done by..oh say...somehow driving a knuckle on the hand back roughly 1.5 centimeters? Just out of curiosity, of course.^_^
And by knuckles I means the bony part right on the top of the back of your hand where the fingers end. It eventually migrates right back where it should be.
First off, a side note- I discussed the 'chest pains' earlier in answering...I think it was gman1000. While your family has a history of heart problems, if what you've reported here was indicative of the heart problem you would most likely be having much more severe symptoms to go with it, so I'm regarding that as a separate concern.
However, let's take a look at the whole picture here:
a) Unusually susceptible to pins and needles
b) Possibly poor circulation to the extremities
c) Hypermotile joints
d) Family history of heart issues
Without knowing anything else here, I'm going to go out on a limb: does your family have a history of connective-tissue disorders? If all these things are linked somehow, that's what I'd suggest, but of course to make any such claim with any certainty I'd need to know more, particularly about the exact nature of your family's heart issues.
@ Devoidless:
Oh, I forgot to mention. I haven't heard of angina/heart attack pain being referred to the right arm. Most commonly it's on the left side of the chest. Sometimes it's in the middle of the chest, or referred to the left upper arm. In rarer cases still it's abdominal.
In almost all cases, a combination weakness, dizziness, palpitations, nausea, sweating and shortness of breath accompany.
Thread is locked!