Some Fascinating Medical Facts You Probably Don't Know

• Dimples are caused by an abnormally short facial muscle.

• The zygomaticus major, a facial muscle, is attached to the skin of your cheeks. Dimples appear when the muscle pulls hard enough on your cheeks to cause visible indentations on your face. This usually occurs when we speak or smile, when the muscle is contracting. For some people, the dimples are always there. This occurs when the muscle is too short. This is a condition that is extremely common among children. As they get older the dimples usually begin to disappear.
• In a single hour, kidneys receive around 120 pints of blood.
• The blood flow in kidneys is higher than the blood flow in the heart, liver, and brain.
• Once a person reaches the age of 40, the number of functional nephrons present in each kidney start falling at a rate of 1% a year.
• Kidneys are responsible for maintaining a constant amount of fluid in the body. The entire blood in the body gets filtered around 400 times a day through the kidneys.
• If one kidney is taken away and the functional capacity of the other kidney is reduced to just 75%, it can still sustain life. This happens because the nephrons are capable of enlarging and handling the excess load. This is known as hypertrophy.
• Kidneys pump around 400 gallons of recycled blood every day.
• Kidneys are connected to the bladder with the help of two tubes known as ureters. It is the bladder where the urine is stored. The urine that we excrete is stored anywhere between 1 and 8 hours. The interesting fact is that we don’t urinate until the bladder is half full. One half of the bladder is full, signals are sent to the brain which in turn tells us that it is time to urinate.
• Excessive antacids and milk can cause kidney stones.
• Kidney disease can never be reversed. Its progression can only be slowed down.29.
• High BP and diabetes can both lead to the failure of kidneys.
• The first-ever kidney transplant was conducted by Yuri Voronoy, a Russian surgeon in the year 1933. The transplant failed.
• The first-ever successful kidney transplant was conducted by Dr. Joseph E. Murray in December 1954. The transplant was between two identical twins. The operation took place in Massachusetts at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital.
• Nearly 500 million people globally (which nearly 10% of the global adult population) suffer from some kind of kidney problem/damage. This leads to or millions of premature death every year because of Chronic Kidney disease-induced cardiovascular diseases.
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• the liver has the amazing ability to regenerate itself which makes surgeries like liver transplant possible. When people donate half their liver to someone who needs it, the remaining part of the liver regenerates the donated part.
  
• The Self Appendectomy. It happened during the 6th Soviet Antarctic Expedition at Novolazarevskaya Station. The patient "Leonid Rogozov" was the only physician on the station, so the assistant was a mechanic. It was on April 30, 1961. The operation took 2 hours. He positioned himself so that he could see his own body using a mirror when doing the surgery, he made a 12 cm cut through which he found and removed the appendix. After 5 days the doctor felt good, and after 7 days he removed the wires which had been used to sew up the body.
  
  
  
  

• Avoiding Lawsuits Instead of Providing Health Care.
  
  A Jackson Healthcare survey uncovered that the vast majority of doctors, 92 percent, made medical decisions according to legal concerns rather than providing the best standard of diagnostic care for their patients. Every year, patients endure hundreds of thousands of unnecessary tests and procedures, ordered to avoid any potential of medical malpractice. Eight percent of all surgeries, 14 percent of prescriptions and more than a quarter of all tests are performed to avoid litigation. The resulting cost to the American health care system alone measures between $650-$850 billion per year. Even worse, some doctors actively avoid treating patients listed as “high-risk cases” for lawsuits.
• 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 number of prescriptions they write for the company’s product. Pharmaceutical sales representatives monitor the number 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.
• For every pound of fat gained, you add seven miles of new blood vessels.
  
  New tissue needs a 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.
• The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
  
  Or any other encyclopedia for that matter. 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.
• Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails. 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.
  
• The largest internal organ is the small intestine. Despite being called the smaller of the two intestines, your small intestine is actually four times as long as the average adult is tall. If it weren’t looped back and forth upon itself it wouldn’t fit inside the abdominal cavity.
  
• Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s. The main reason for this is simply that on average women tend to be smaller than men and have less mass to pump blood to. But women’s and men’s hearts can actually act quite differently, especially when experiencing trauma like a heart attack, and many treatments that work for men must be adjusted or changed entirely to work for women. Additionally, over a lifetime, at your normal (resting) heart rate you will have pumped enough blood to fill thirteen oil supertankers. To further expound on this fact, on average, your heart beats 40,000,000 times per year. Doing the math, over your lifetime (both men and women averaged), that results in 2,600,000,000 heartbeats (two billion, six hundred million). This does not even factor in your increased heartbeats due to your love of exercise or fear.

• The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet. No wonder you can feel your heartbeat so easily. Pumping blood through your body quickly and efficiently takes quite a bit of pressure resulting in the strong contractions of the heart and the thick walls of the ventricles which push blood to the body.
• Monday is the day of the week when the risk of heart attack is greatest. Yet another reason to loathe Mondays! A ten year studying Scotland found that 20% more people die of heart attacks on Mondays than any other day of the week. Researchers theorize that it’s a combination of too much fun over the weekend with the stress of going back to work that causes the increase.
• The most common blood type in the world is Type O. Blood banks find it valuable as it can be given to those with both type A and B blood. The rarest blood type, A-H or Bombay blood due to the location of its discovery, has been found in less than a hundred people since it was discovered.
• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• 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 tires out the face which doesn’t do a thing to improve your mood.
•  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.
•  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 living tissue. Since it’s not alive, it can’t repair itself, leaving your dentist to do the work instead.
•  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 the 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.
• 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.
•  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.
• A person will die from lack of sleep sooner than they will from starvation which usually take weeks.
  
• A sneeze generates a wind of 166 km/hr (100 mi/hr), and a cough moves out at 100 km/hr(60 mi/hr).
•  Our blood is on a 60,000-mile journey per day.
•  Our eyes can distinguish up to ten million color surfaces and take in more information than the largest telescope known to man.
•  Our lungs inhale over two million liters of air every day, without even thinking.
•  When we touch something, we send a message to our brain at 124 mph.
•  We exercise at least 36 muscles when we smile.
•  We are about 70 percent water.
•  Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities.
•  An estimated 5 to 10% of cancers are entirely hereditary. Most cancers develop through a combination of hereditary and environmental factors. 
• Smoking causes an estimated 90% of lung cancer. Tobacco has killed 50 million people in the last decade. If trends continue, a billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century, which equates to one person every six seconds.
•  Those who sleep less than six hours a night are more likely to develop colon cancer than those who sleep more.
•  Cancer has two main characteristics: Abnormal cell growth and the ability to spread to other parts of the body(metastasis).
•  In 2008, there were an estimated 12,667,500 new cases of cancer worldwide. Eastern Asia had the newest cases (3,720,000) and Micronesia the fewest (700). North America had approximately 1,603,900 new cases.
•  One in eight deaths in the world is due to cancer. Cancer causes more deaths than AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.
  

• Cancer is the leading cause of death in developed countries and the second leading cause of death in developing countries, after heart disease. Globally, heart disease is the number one killer.
•  In 2008, 7.6 million people died of cancer globally, which equates to 21,000 cancer deaths a day. By 2030, 21.4 million new cancer cases are expected to occur globally with 13.2 million cancer deaths.
•  The most common cancer in women globally is breast cancer, with an estimated 1.4 million new cases diagnosed in 2008. Breast cancer is also the leading cause of cancer death in women worldwide, with an estimated 458,400 deaths a year.
• Cancer patients have twice the risk of suicide than the general population. Men are more likely to kill themselves immediately after diagnosis.
•  Cancer drugs are the largest category of drugs in terms of sales.