Medicine Facts

It is now possible to print human skin with an inkjet printer!

The electric chair was invented by a dentist!

The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.

One or two alcohol drinks a day can be anti-inflammatory.

Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as medicine.

Surgeons who listen to music during operations perform better than those who don't .

In 1898, Bayer, the pharmaceutical company that makes Aspirin, marketed heroin as a non-addictive cough suppressant and pain reliever.

Jimmy Carter is the first U.S. President to have been born in a hospital.

Human birth control pills work on gorillas.

Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, was an ophthalmologist by profession!

Maggots will only eat flesh if it is dead. For this reason, they are often used to remove the burnt skin from severe burn patients.

Approximately 25,000 workers died during the building of the Panama Canal, and approximately 20,000 of them contracted malaria and yellow fever.

In Nepal and across South Asia, cow dung has been used for centuries in traditional medicine, household sanitation, and religious rituals.

Putting sugar on a wound or cut will greatly reduce pain and speed up the healing process.

Army ants are used as “natural sutures”. Their jaws are so powerful, natives staple wounds by forcing ants to bite them and break off the body.

Research has shown that compounds in marijuana, particularly CBD and THC, have anti-inflammatory properties and show promise in treating autoimmune conditions such as arthritis, lupus, colitis, and multiple sclerosis.

Scientists have developed injectable microparticles filled with oxygen that can keep animals alive for up to 30 minutes without breathing, potentially revolutionizing emergency medicine.

Chocolate was once considered medicine, prescribed by European doctors to treat angina and depression as late as the 19th century.

The human liver can regenerate to its full size from as little as 25% of its original tissue. It's the only internal organ that can do this — which is why living-donor liver transplants work. Surgeons remove up to 60% of the donor's liver, transplant it, and both the donor and recipient end up with full-sized livers within months.

In 1999, a Swedish doctor fell through ice while skiing and spent 80 minutes trapped underwater. Her body temperature dropped to 56.7°F - the lowest ever recorded in a surviving patient. She had no heartbeat. Doctors spent 9 hours reviving her. She later became a radiologist at the very hospital that saved her life.

In open-label placebo trials, patients told plainly they were taking sugar pills still reported real symptom relief for conditions like IBS, back pain and migraine.

Rogaine was not invented to grow hair. Upjohn developed minoxidil in the 1950s to treat ulcers - it failed. They pivoted to a blood pressure drug, approved as Loniten in 1979. During those trials, 60-80% of patients grew unexpected hair. A 1980 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine exposed the side effect. Upjohn launched Rogaine in 1988 - the first drug the FDA ever approved to regrow hair.