In his wonderfully rich book Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages, Dr. Jack Hartnell explores how societies at the time understood the human body, and shows that the era wasn’t as ignorant or stagnant as we often assume.

However, we still have come incredibly far since those days and are treating many conditions that were fatal back then. Not to mention we no longer see bloodletting as the answer to everything.

To learn more about our current capabilities, Reddit user Immediate_Hair_3393 asked all health professionals on the platform to share the questions limiting us right now.

#1

One of the few ABSOLUTES in medical science is that nobody born blind has ever developed schizophrenia.

Image credits: beboleche

#2

OBGYN here: we still don’t know exactly what makes labor start. We know all about the mechanics and physiology, but we don’t know what makes the average uterus say it’s “go time.”.

Image credits: _mcr

#3

The Gut Microbiome: While it’s well-known that the gut plays a huge role in digestion, researchers are discovering just how much our gut bacteria affect other parts of our health, like mood, immunity, and even brain function.

Image credits: VictoriaFaith14

#4

I’m an anesthesiologist. We still don’t really know why inhaled volatile anesthetics like sevoflurane, the principle anesthetic agent used to maintain general anesthesia, work. We kind of have an idea of maybe how it happens, but really we don’t know

It’s commonly said in my field that whoever figures this out will win the next Nobel prize in medicine

Image credits: SignificanceMost8826

#5

Doctor here. Off the top of my head, here’s a few deceptively big ones:

1) We still aren’t exactly sure how anesthesia works. We just know it causes certain effects, and they are useful so we use it.

2) psychiatry is still shockingly infantile in our understanding of human disorders. It’s constantly in a state of flux, we don’t understand a lot about the meds we currently use, and the diagnostic criteria for disorders still changes as we realize “hey maybe all these behaviors aren’t the same source disorder”. It’s incredibly hard to diagnose when the criteria is largely based on self report and subjective observations.

3) To a lesser degree than #2, neurology is still learning a lot. It’s further because you can observe more objective findings in neuro than psych, but we still struggle a lot with how brains function.

4) Immunology. Don’t even ask me, because no one knows really.

5) yawns. Still guessing on why that happens too. There’s some theories, but that’s the best we got.

Image credits: YoungSerious

#6

I had a lecturer at medical school say “half of medicine is made up, we just don’t know which half”.

Image credits: aloadofguff

#7

How basically any of medical science works in relation to women and their bodies – almost all the data is based on men, and a lot of it almost exclusively.

Image credits: vegandeath

#8

Not a doctor but I study cell and molecular biology. The immune system is wildly complex and right now feels as though we’re staring down into Mariana’s trench.

Image credits: mk4jetta514

#9

Why our brain doesn’t use its stem cells it has to heal itself.

Image credits: P-L63

#10

There’s still *a lot* about the immune system that’s undiscovered.

Image credits: CalvinTheBold2

#11

Not MD but PhD, right now we are working on the connection between our intestinal microbiome and neuropsychiatric disease and brain aging. For instance, people with inflammatory bowel disease are more likely to develop dementia and experience co-morbid anxiety and depression, but we dont know why.

Image credits: uncle-chewie

#12

One I didn’t see mentioned: we apparently don’t know precisely *how* our bodies can distinguish gas from poop. We have some ideas, we know there are a ton of nerve endings in the area, but the precise mechanism of our bodies telling our brains “this is a fart, let loose” isn’t really understood.

What blows my mind is, it’s distinct enough that we even pass gas while asleep. That difference must be wired DEEP!

Image credits: BIGJFRIEDLI

#13

For many medicines, it’s not clear how they work, or even if they work (for example, look at the actual efficacy trials of name brand antidepressants. When you look at them in aggregate, they look like they barely work. Yet, basically everybody knows somebody whose life was saved by a specific antidepressant.).

Image credits: DowntownBugSoup

#14

There are organelles called [vaults] in human cells and in most other eukaryotic species. They are made of 78 copies of a protein called the major vault protein, totalling about three times the size of a ribosome, and larger than most viruses.

Their function is not totally understood, but it’s probably something to do with the nucleus, though analogs of the genes for vaults even appear in bacteria. As they are found in such a wide variety of species, life on Earth must have started making vaults early in its history. The similarity of the genes encoding vault proteins across diverse species would presumably indicate the importance of vaults for viable life, but experiments haven’t shown a great deal of harm done to lab animals that had their vault genes knocked out.

Even stranger, several of the species used in laboratories as model organisms naturally lack vaults. The use of these organisms long predates the discovery of vaults in 1986, with some going back over a century.

Image credits: Gecko99

#15

Apparently we know next to nothing about fibroids, which like 75% of women have at some point in their lives. That’s great, considering that the largest one removed was 100 lbs- so not exactly a minor issue.

There are theories about different hormones and what things put you at higher risk, but aside from having surgery to have your existing ones removed, there is basically no information on what you can to do prevent them from coming back.

Image credits: Regular-Training-678

#16

The biggest one I want solved

How we remember things, how does our memory work?

Some headway has been made at MIT but it hasn’t been completely c*****d yet.

Image credits: noobwithguns

#17

We don’t know the precise mechanism by which B12 deficiency causes nerve damage. We know that it happens, but not why.

(Many medical things are like that – easily observed and proven cause and effect, but complex and unclear mechanisms. Much of biology is still a black box to us. Neurological stuff in particular is full of this – lots of “we definitely know damage here causes effect XYZ, but not why.”).

Image credits: Yglorba

#18

Have you ever had a muscle knot? Well apparently they’re undetectable by any test or machine, and medicine hasn’t yet figured out what’s going on in our bodies when we experience them.

Image credits: beulahbeulah

#19

How it gets conscious.

Image credits: BoilingPolkaDots

#20

The Role of Our DNA: We’ve sequenced the human genome, but a large part of it remains unexplained.

Image credits: BellaSmiless7

#21

Allergies, spefically food allergies . And why do adults develop them after never reacting to them before?

Image credits: saturnbunny1

#22

I’m a derm. We don’t know what exactly causes itching, like the molecular pathways for it. That’s why it can be so hard to find a good treatment when a patient comes in for itchy skin.

Image credits: criduchat1-

#23

Why we sleep.

Image credits: Mairon12

#24

One of the frustrating, but not so secret things in medicine is that racial differences exist and they can’t be discussed in today’s climate.

There are differences in d**g efficacy, growth, disease susceptibility or immunity just about everything.

It’s preventing personalized treatments. AI can now pretty accurately guess someone’s race and s*x from a single view chest xray so things may change.

People always think of this as a negative but in reality it should be approached like family history being super relevant for cancer or heart disease surveillance.

Image credits: raka_defocus

#25

The placenta is the only human organ grown for a specific purpose then discarded when it is no longer needed.

Image credits: bourbonmangattan

#26

“Unexplained Infertility”

…is the actual name, of an actual diagnosis, given to my wife and I, because according to every test, based on what modern medical science knows about fertility, we’re fine. We *should* be able to conceive. “All the numbers are right.” We probably even would be able to conceive, either of us, with different partners. But no one knows why the two of us can’t, *together*. And it happens to far more couples than anyone talks about. But the only diagnosis we all get, is “unexplained infertility”.

Image credits: CarpeNivem

#27

There are smell receptors in the nose for things that don’t exist.

Edited to include more information:

They’re called “orphan olfactory receptors”

“The state of the art of odorant receptor deorphanization: A report from the orphanage” – Zita Peterlin, Stuart Firestein, Matthew E. Rogers (April 14 2014)

From the top of the article:
*the odorant receptors (ORs) comprise nearly 50% of the ∼800 G protein–coupled receptors (GPCRs) in humans, yet ∼90% of human ORs remain orphan receptors with unknown ligands.*

It goes on to discusses the challenges of deorphanizing the vast majority of human olfactory receptors and outline different strategies to identify ligands for these receptors and explains why almost 90% of human ORs remain “orphan” despite their large numbers.

Image credits: fishlegstudio

#28

What causes endometriosis and how do you treat it effectively. The leading theory is “retrograde menstruation,” which occurs in 80-90% of women. Ok….. so why do 80-90% of women not have endometriosis? There’s clearly something else going on that we don’t know.

Also, the only way to remove or get rid of endometriosis is through surgery. But there is a high rate of recurrence after surgery. Some women undergo multiple surgeries for it.

Image credits: looooongsigh

#29

Not a doctor but a speech pathologist – we still don’t fully understand what causes people to develop a stutter. We know there’s sometimes a genetic link and that some children do it as a developmental stage that they grow out of. It’s very difficult to treat.

Image credits: pequenapeanut

#30

I have a very niche answer. We don’t know what is supposed to naturally bind to the area that benzodiazepines work at.

Benzodiazepines, BZD, are medications like Xanax and Valium. They produce anti-anxiety effects. And they have a very distinct chemical shape to fit into the BZD site in a group of five proteins. But we don’t know what is supposed to go there. Many medications are analogs of naturally binding molecules that we copy and then use to create an effect. The BZD site is for something, we just don’t know what.

Image credits: Mrzahn

#31

I’m a sleep specialist. While we do have some good theories about some of the functions of REM as far as how it affects the brain and health, we still don’t fully understand the purpose of dreaming. Like, why do we dream at all and why do dreams have a narrative instead of random incomprehensible imagery? Unfortunately this is unlikely to even be solved.

#32

Not a doctor, but the amount of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I got from doctors when I asked questions during my treatment for breast cancer was astounding. That’s not to imply they were useless or didn’t know what they were doing, I just asked a lot of questions lol.

Me: Why do I need to take Claritin before chemo?
Nurse: It helps with bone pain.
Me: Oh, that’s interesting, why is that?
Nurse: Nobody knows!

Me: What’s the cording I’m experiencing in my arm following my mastectomy?
Physical Therapist: Nobody actually knows what it’s made of or where it comes from!

Me: Why am I suddenly unable to eat gluten following my cancer treatment?
Gastro Doc: Trauma, probably?

Having cancer really made it clear to me that so much of the human body is still a mystery!

#33

It’s not cancer. It’s cancer(S) and every specialized and stem cell (undifferentiated pluripotent cell) is at risk of mutating into something that doesn’t stop multiplying.

The cancer of a specialized gland cell is called adenocarcinoma.

The cancer of a skin cell is called squamous cell carcinoma.

The cancer of a melanocyte is melanoma and so on.

So anytime someone says, “they’re hiding the cure for cancer” they are being magnificently ignorant.

-Pathologist.

#34

Had a pathologist tell me that the interesting part of his job wasn’t finding out how someone died, it was seeing everything that can be wrong with someone, so many life threatening or life altering, horrible things that a person can have going on and still be alive.

Good friend died of pneumonia (he was too busy at work, couldn’t afford to take time off), he kept using OTC meds for the symptoms.

He died unattended, so the coroner had to get involved, they did an autopsy. His body had cancer in three different places, he never stopped.

Dude was old-time tough.

#35

I’m a nurse, not a doctor, but in school I learned that when in vitro fertilization was being pioneered, scientists were unable to create an embryo from the combination of s***m and egg. It wasn’t until they added female secretions in that they were able to produce viable embryos, and they don’t know what role those secretions play in the process.

This was about 15 years ago, so if anyone has new information on the topic I’d love to hear it!

#36

If I’m not mistaken, don’t we still not have a definitive cause for migraines?

Edit to add: it took me years to find my trigger (sleeping on my back, exacerbating my apnea). I would wake up with a raging headache at 4am and barf 2-3 times an hour until 2pm, twice a month. I couldn’t eat, drink, take medicine, drive, talk, watch TV, or think. I would spend the day alternating between the bathroom floor or in bed hallucinating from the pain.

I got a daith piercing nearly 4 years ago and it changed my whole life. I can count on one hand the number of times a headache has made me barf since getting the piercing. If I wake up with one, I maybe get sick once, take an extra strength Tylenol, and lie down for an hour, and it’s like I never had anything wrong to begin with.

Edit 2: I feel like migraines are one of the most polarizing health issues. Ask any sufferer and they’ll tell you about the absolute hell they experience- and everyone’s triggers and cures are different.

#37

Rabies pathology

Alzheimer’s etiology

Encephalitis lethargica/chronic fatigue syndrome.

#38

The “uncanny valley” fear. Why are humans unnerved and/or afraid of things that sound like, mimic, look like or act like humans but aren’t human?

Think of seeing human shaped shadows, dolls, robots, animals walking on 2 legs vs their usual 4, AI… it’s fascinating how we all have that feeling about some of the same things.

#39

According to my doctor…. what causes IBS

Oh…. also… what exactly causes sexually induced sneezing.

#40

Not a doctor, but this was posted a few years ago when the same question was asked:

We still aren’t sure what causes precordial catch syndrome.

Reddit is where I finally put a name to the sporadic chest pain I had in my teens/20s that goes away when you take a deep breath.

#41

Not a doctor but I always find it wild how unsophisticated a lot of surgery is. Like it is the year 2025 and our best solution for lots of problems is still just cutting something. Like your hand/wrist hurts lets just cut that ligament. Oh you’ve got stomach pains? Let’s just cut out the gallbladder. It is crazy that we haven’t figured out less barbaric solutions to a lot of these problems.

#42

There’s still a lot unknown about hunger and satiation. Nobody really knows what causes eating disorders, especially anorexia. It’s scary how much hunger cues impact all of us.

#43

Chronic Pain. Or pain management, the whole spectrum of it.

Total mystery.

#44

The brain and especially how it governs our actions and personality.. Why do some people commit crimes like r**e and m*rder despite knowing the consequences while others would never do such things? Why do some people require multiple chances for ‘rehabilitation’ while others live their entire lives ‘right’? We don’t know the answers. It annoys me to no end when some people while chime in and claim “everyone can be rehabilitated” as if we actually know what that even means and how it works.

#45

We still don’t know what actually causes ADHD— which is why it is not readily accepted as being a “real” disorder by much of the population, and people think it “only” affects attention.

However…

Without trying to make this in to a lecture and keeping it short…

There’s a very active part of the brain that does a lot of… “things”. We don’t know what those “things” specifically are, but there are a lot of indicators it does something big!!

**The Claustrum!**

The theory goes, it’s the part of the brain responsible for actual consciousness!

…but back to the ADHD part.

2-5% of people have ADHD. If you’re on social media you can tell it’s a lot of people…! Additionally the leading causes of death for people with ADHD are s*****e and murder. That’s right, if you have ADHD, you are more likely to die of s*****e *or* murder than to live to old age… yes. If you have ADHD you literally have an actual disorder that means you’ll either off yourself or get
killed by someone else….but I digress….

What we do know, the Claustrum, lights up with greater activity with people who have ADHD. We know when the Claustrum is inhibited in rats, they kind of just do…whatever…

If one day we understand the Claustrum better, and it turns out that is responsible for ADHD.. that would mean the general public could finally come to understand — especially the parents of ADHD kids (who are significantly more likely to abuse their ADHD children)… that they’re actually mistreating their kids because of a health issue more closely related to *Epilepsy* than just “lack of discipline” or “behavioral problems”.

That shift in thinking would save lives. I hope the purpose of the Claustrum is clearly identified and understood one day.

(It also might mean people with ADHD may experience human consciousness very differently, too… and that’s where it gets *really* interesting.).

#46

Obligatory not a doctor, but a lotttttt of folks don’t understand spinal cord stuff.

I think people should know spinal cord injuries aren’t “healed” if the patient starts walking again. And that if one happens to you when you’re young, it’s okay and you don’t have to try to force yourself “back to normal”. You have a new normal now, and that’s OKAY, and nobody can make your decisions but you. They can be ableist and shame you, but don’t listen to them.

Source: experience. K love y’all bye.

#47

Not a doctor. But I’ve spent a lot of time in doctors offices. There’s a lot of s**t wrong with me.

So. I have an illness called idiopathic intracranial hypertension the idiopathic means they don’t know why the f**k it happens.

So, I got it right after I got the Mirena IUD. It turned out a lot of people get it right after they got the Mirena IUD. Enough for a class action law suit it be filed.

It got tossed immediatly.

So, Mirena has listed in the side effects it could cause a stroke, sure, but effect csf? Absolutely not. Not a side effect.

But here’s my thing. If I go to my gyno right after I get birth control, and say ‘hey, I’ve had a nonstop headache and Im concerned.’ they shouldn’t wave it off and say it’s normal. They should remove it and send you to a neuro to check for a stroke or csf issue, cause it’s a possible side effect. But they don’t.

And neuros deny birth control could be an iih factor cause IT’S NOT LISTED IN THE OFFICIAL SIDE EFFECTS.

But also.

So, I got my thyroid removed years and years ago. I’d been on a stable dosage of levothyroxine for like, 6 years.

I get the Mirena, the csf vein in my brain collapses, and all of a sudden my tsh levels go banana balls. Its like, 7. It had been 1, so, I am no longer absorbing my levothyroxine correctly.

My neuro tells me to keep in the Mirena, my endo tells me the Mirena and the iih can’t effect the levo absorption, and I’m just… Dying.

Over the course of the year we keep adjusting the levo, and my tsh just is not playing ball. It’s just ping ponging wildly.

One year after this all starts I just take the Mirena out, against gyno and neuros recommendations. The pain of my neverending headache decreases SIGNIFICANTLY. My tsh levels finally go back to normal.

All my doctors just shrug. Oh, what a coincidence. It wasn’t the Mirena though. It can’t do that.

Also. When my brain collapsed, I suddenly became intolerant to A LOT of foods. But according to the allergist that doesn’t happen. You don’t suddenly become allergic to basically everything. She kicked me out. I basically eat the mcas+oral allergy syndrome diet now but honestly help would be good. Brain damage couldn’t cause massive food intolerances? Wtf?

I also spent two years just… Passing out over and over again every day from the sheer agony of it all. After I finally got neuro surgery I couldn’t fall asleep naturally any more. No pain, no sleep. I went to a sleep specialist and he was like ‘pain keeps you awake it doesn’t put you to sleep. You aren’t special’. I don’t think they’ve researched people stuck in a neverending migraine for years.

Working with doctors is hell.

Edit: bonus. I live in Boston. All my doctors were supposed to be at the top of their field. Big wigs. Muckity mucks. Professors at Harvard or tufts or BU.

Phffffffffff.

#48

How the organs we think are safe to remove are actually not.

#49

Ibuprofen is a blind ninja.

#50

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. A disease that causes diffuse scarring “fibrosis” of the lung. Anytime you hear idiopathic in medicine it essentially means we don’t know what causes it. There are multiple fibrotic lung diseases that they have identified the causes of over the years. In general any idiopathic illness is likely something we will know much more about one day. This just comes first to mind.

#51

Another, how babies/young children assimilate so much information so quickly.

It cannot (as far as I know) be replicated by a computer.

#52

Mental health professional rather than MD, but we still don’t know much about the mechanisms of schizophrenia or bipolar. We know some things about them, but there’s a lot that’s very confusing.

#53

Apparently no one knows why aspirin works. We just know it does.

Edit: apparently it’s acetaminophen not aspirin. My bad.

#54

Not a doctor, but I have a “rare” chronic illness. Young doctors are more open to helping me, while older doctors (especially male) are not very helpful.

I’ve heard doctors say “I’ve heard of your disease. We had a lecture on it once.”

So there is so much they do not know.

#55

Not a doctor, but someone who just got diagnosed with POTS after a year of medical chaos. There’s a TON of “yeah this medicine for this thing helps with this other thing, we don’t know why, but it works” (aka propranolol for migraines)

Also concussions. Half the research isn’t up to date and it’s so specific to the person. .

#56

I’m not a doctor but when I found out I was having identical twins I started looking into the biological process that leads to identical twins and it turns out nobody knows! There’s a lot of info on the type of identical twins you’ll get depending on when the zygote split (like whether a placenta is shared, if the sac is shared, or if they’re conjoined)… but WHY??? There is also significant disagreement in the medical community on whether or not there’s a hereditary factor.

Feel free to correct me if my info is out of date though cause I looked into this about 5 years ago….

#57

What causes chronic fatigue syndrome, what type of illness it is (neurological, immunological etc) or how to treat or cure it.

#58

Dr Why can’t I sleep even with my sleep meds?

#59

The distance between your wrist and the bend in your elbow is the exact distance of your foot. Try it.

#60

How the placebo effect works.

from Bored Panda https://ift.tt/12TgB9t
via IFTTT source site : boredpanda