The Monday Sidebar…
October 6, 2008 by Liz Lewis
Filed under Exposed!, Extreme, Historic Health, Humor, Medical History, Obesity, Oddities, The Sunday Sidebar
Ready for some more interesting, fascinating, unusual, strange, and even bizarre news…
Pay patients to go to the doctor? - in England, Health Service Managers are looking at ways to get people in unhealthy people in the lower social economic rankings to visit the doctor. The thinking is that if you can get people to the doctor earlier, before chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease set in, the government health system would save money. It makes sort of makes sense. But the idea is getting flack from politicans and medical experts alike who say that the government shouldn’t be bribing people to stay healthy.
‘World’s Fattest Man’ to Marry After Massive Diet - after two years of dieting, Manuel Uribe, the world’s heaviest man and his girlfriend are set to wed this month. Originally weighing in a couple of years ago at 1,235 pounds, the 43 year old Manual has shed around 700 pounds.
Something of a celebrity, Manual has been giving telephone advice to Jose Luis Garza, another determined dieter who weighs in at around 990 pounds.
Discover the surgical tools of Ancient Rome at the Historical Collections & Services of the Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia. Excavated from the House of the Surgeon at Pompeii, looking at this collection of instruments makes you realize how far medical science has come (and how lucky we are that it has advanced so far).
As for the bizarre, how about this cookbook by a Russian chef called ‘Cooking with Balls’. Featuring testicle pizza, battered testicles and barbecued testicles with giblets recipes made from the sex organs of ostriches, bulls, pigs, turkeys and stallions, this e-book is definitely ‘one of a kind’ and not for the faint hearted.
And that’s it for this week’s Monday Sidebar…
Me and My Shadow.
Ever feel that you are being followed, that someone is ’shadowing’ every move you make?
Well, instead of being a real person, it could, believe it or not, be your ’shadow person’, the result of unusual activity in a specific region of your brain known as the left temporoparietal junction.
According to a study, published in Nature in 2006 (a British science journal), ‘…stimulation of a site on the brain’s left hemisphere prompts the creepy feeling that somebody is close by.’
Focusing on the case of a 22 year old woman with no psychiatric history who was being evaluated for epilepsy treatment, the study revealed that whenever the left temporoparietal junction region of her brain was electrically stimulated, the woman would describe feeling a ’shadow person’ who micmicked her bodily movements.
It was a feeling she described as ‘unpleasant’ and ‘extremely real’.
Just sounds plain weird to me…
Read more of the case study here.
Kelly Townsend