Nerds Republic: #disease

Showing posts with label #disease. Show all posts

With over 3.5 million Americans living with autism, it’s amazing how little those of us on the outside know about the condition. How does it affect the lives of the people who deal with it every day? What medical complications are associated with autism? We should all know better.

Because we invest so little time in learning to understand our friends, family members, and neighbors with autism, it’s no wonder that this little girl feels like the world doesn’t want her in it. She wrote a letter to her mom to vent her frustrations, and what she had to say will shatter your heart.

What ‘messages’ are children hearing – from ourselves, from other parents, at school, from media and in the general…

Posted by I am Cadence on Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Please know that when you speak ill of people with autism, they’re listening. It’s not fair that the media demonizes people on the autism spectrum, because they’re thinking, feeling human beings just like everyone else. Help do your part by becoming educated on the basic facts of the condition. We all need to make people like Cadence know that they’re wonderful.

Ste Walker looks like any ordinary 24-year-old man. He works a normal job in Halifax, England, he eats at restaurants, he goes on dates — all normal 24-year-old guy stuff. But looks can be extremely deceiving.

Walker actually suffers from Crohn’s disease. The condition is chronic, and it negatively impacts thousands of people’s lives worldwide. On the surface, he looks like a regular guy, so people give him a hard time when he uses handicapped parking spaces and toilet stalls. He understands why people get upset, which is why he decided to let everyone in on the pain that has to deal with every day.

Ste Walker posted some photos on Facebook to show people that those suffering with Crohn’s disease often look totally normal on the outside.

Facebook / Ste Walker

What’s going on below the surface, however, is something much more debilitating.

Underneath his clothes, things are far from pleasant. He’s forced to endure endless pain just to keep his basic bodily functions on track.

Facebook / Ste Walker

He wears a Hickman line, which is a silicone tube that allows medicine and lubricant to be administered to his body because his stomach doesn’t function properly. He also wears an ileostomy bag, which serves as a secondary bowel.

His Ryhlls tube — which enters his abdomen through his nose — helps his stomach drain properly. Aside from all of that, he takes multiple medications every day to help regulate liver and kidney function.

(via IFL Science)

The point of Ste Walker’s Facebook project is to let people know that they shouldn’t be so quick to judge people who don’t appear to be handicapped or unhealthy on the surface. Some are forced to endure suffering that’s invisible to everyone else.

If you remember the old TV show House, you know that there are a lot of terrifying, obscure diseases floating around out there.The only good thing about them is that they’re pretty rare.

But sometimes, you’re the unlucky person who happens to catch one. That’s something Redditor gullibletrout and his wife learned the hard way back in 2010.

In 2010, these mysterious black spots began appearing on his wife’s hand.

Imgur / oestk

They started out small, but kept growing.

Imgur / oestk

At first, they thought that the growths were blood blisters.

The spots have not reappeared.

The physician believes that these were pyogenic granuloma.

Imgur / oestk

They can be caused by irritation, physical trauma, or hormonal imbalances. This woman’s case was likely caused by a switch in birth control pills. The good news is that they’re harmless, but in some cases, they have been known to grow back.

(via Reddit)

Even though they turned out to be nothing, can you imagine how scared she must have been when these things started taking over her hand? It’s amazing (and completely unsettling) to think about what our bodies are capable of.

You can thank science for much of what makes our world go ’round, like food preservation, clean water, and comfortable homes. But as stories like Frankenstein and Jurassic Park have shown us, the road to innovation can sometimes take a gruesome detour that can lead to some unethical choices.

Here are some of the most controversial experiments ever conducted, during which scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could do it, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Britches

Britches was a monkey who was torn from his mother and forced into animal testing at the University of California. He was assigned to a project that would test a prototype sonar device for blind people. The only problem is that Britches wasn’t blind. The scientists sewed his eyes shut. He was eventually freed by the Animal Liberation Front during a raid in 1985.

Project MKUltra

In the 1950s, the CIA’s resident scientists began experimenting with mind control, using LSD, electroshock therapy, and the repetition of sound. Most of their findings were destroyed during the Watergate scandal, but there is evidence that the government dosed unsuspecting citizens with drugs to observe them.

Criminal Testicle Transplants

Leo Stanley, head physician of the San Quentin prison in 1913, believed that males who committed crimes had less testosterone than other men, so he who would test his theory by giving inmates new testicles. Because of the shortage of human scrotums, sometimes inmates would be fixed with animal balls instead.

Skin Hardening

In an effort to make skin tougher for soldiers, Alber Kligman did experiments by using inmates as test subjects. Kligman would inject them with dangerous chemicals, but all his unfortunate test subjects got out of the deal were blisters, burns, and permanent scars.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Subjects were organized into two groups. Some were the “guards” and the others were the “prisoners.” Even though they were assigned these roles arbitrarily, the “guards” quickly started displaying sadistic behavior, forcing “prisoners” to strip naked and sleep on the hard concrete. One “prisoner” was dehumanized so much that he had a mental breakdown and was forced to exit the experiment.

The Milgram Obedience Experiment

Participants in this experiment were told by the experimenter to press a button that would shock another person in the other room. The person being shocked was actually just an actor pretending, but the participant didn’t know that. All they were told was that experiment required them to continue shocking this person, upping the voltage until they were motionless. The study found that 65 percent of people would continue shocking the person even after they were screaming in pain. Shocking, right?

Harlow’s Experiments In Isolation

Rhesus monkeys were torn from their mothers as infants and forced into Harlow’s “pit of despair” cage, with only a water bottle to keep them company. The point of the project was to study the effects of isolation on child development and subsequent depression. Not surprisingly, the baby monkeys became depressed. They also developed physical problems like poor digestion.

Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The US Public Health Service purposefully injected black male sharecroppers with syphilis in order to study its effects. The effects, of course, were that they would get horrible skin disfigurations and eventually die. It seems the government neglected to treat them after infecting them with the STD. By the way, this went on between 1932 and 1970. That’s 40 years! It spanned multiple presidencies.

It turns out the whole “mad-scientist” thing may not be limited to cartoons. The crazy thing is that these people all thought they were doing a great service for mankind, and were willing to continue their questionable work at any cost.

Nerds Republic

A Girl With Autism Wrote Her Mom A Letter -- What She Had To Say Is Heartbreaking

What's Hidden Under This Man's Clothes Is Shocking -- You'd Never Expect It

Ste Walker posted some photos on Facebook to show people that those suffering with Crohn’s disease often look totally normal on the outside.

Underneath his clothes, things are far from pleasant. He’s forced to endure endless pain just to keep his basic bodily functions on track.

His Wife Noticed Something Growing On Her Hand, And What Happened Will Make You Sick

In 2010, these mysterious black spots began appearing on his wife’s hand.

They started out small, but kept growing.

They even started spreading to other parts of the hand.

Wart remover didn’t do anything for them.

Eventually, they decided to seek medical help from a plastic surgeon.

The doctor promptly removed the growths.

Here’s her hand after the procedure was done.

The physician believes that these were pyogenic granuloma.