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 .

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

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

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.

More than 17 million people worldwide dumped ice water on their own heads in 2014, and the Ice Bucket Challenge helped pay for Project MinE, a global hunt for ALS genes. In 2016 its team of more than 80 scientists in 11 countries found NEK1, a gene whose variants turn up in nearly 3 percent of ALS cases in North America and Europe.

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 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.

Nurses on horseback delivered babies in the Kentucky mountains. With no roads, they forded rivers in the dark. Mountain children were told nurses carried babies in their saddlebags. A new baby usually arrived soon after a nurse's visit. In their first 1,000 births, not one mother died. The nation lost more than 5 mothers in every 1,000. The horses are gone now. Nurse-midwives are still there.

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.

Martin Couney ran a Coney Island sideshow. Visitors paid 25 cents to watch premature babies living in incubators. Hospitals were turning preemies away as weaklings. Couney's exhibit gave them state-of-the-art care for free. Parents paid nothing. Over 40 years, roughly 6,500 of the 8,000 babies in his care went home. He wasn't even a licensed doctor.