Most days, our bodies are just there—mundane vessels we inhabit on autopilot. We wake up, get on with our routines, eat, sleep, repeat. But the moment you actually stop and think about what’s happening beneath your skin? It gets weird. Fascinatingly, beautifully weird.

That’s exactly what happened when one Redditor asked users to share medical facts that sound completely fake but are actually true. People delivered with some genuinely strange and interesting stuff, and we’ve pulled together the best responses below. Scroll down and see which ones surprise you.

#1

Your brain can literally convince your body it’s sick just because it’s bored and anxious.

Olealicat:

As someone with an autoimmune issue. This hits.
Random hives for just thinking about hives.

FriendshipCute1524:

I’ve learned if you say “I’m fine” enough your brain can sometimes go “Ohh, Word?” And you just don’t get sick. Like when you get those “I’m getting sick” chills and feels, Just say I’m fine. Sometimes it just works.

© Photo: Diamond_thoughts

#2

Nobody has mentioned the one that always shows up on these threads:

When doctors operate on intestinal stuff, they just jam everything back in. The intestines writhe and wiggle around by themselves until they are back into place correctly.

Fearlessleader85:

Apparently, my great, great aunt was born premature “with her guts hanging out”, which i believe would refer to omphalocele, but this happened in the very early 1900s in the extremely rural inland PNW, and doctors were not common, nor were cars. Her mom thought she was going to pass away, so she didn’t really want anything to do with her, but her dad didn’t want to give up. So he just stuffed her organs inside her as best he could and wrapped a cloth around her belly kinda tight and then carried her around in some type of small box. He took her everywhere, the fields, hunting, everywhere. And surprisingly, she lived. And she was none the worse for wear, her abdomen closed up and her “guts” stayed in and she lived a very long and normal life.
It wasn’t until she was in like her late 60s when she was having some sort of relatively minor procedure, might have been a colonoscopy or maybe she got appendicitis or something, but they realized nothing was quite where it was supposed to be. Her liver wasnt quite the right shape and stuff was all jumbled up.
I think she passed away in her mid 90s. So, apparently, yeah, those organs don’t really need to be in a specific orientation.

© Photo: globster222

#3

Extremely rarely during chest compressions a patient can regain consciousness, only to lose consciousness as soon as the compressions stop. It’s due to good perfusion from high quality compressions.

So imagine you’re doing CPR, your patient starts clawing at your arms and trying to verbalize but you have no choice but to keep going.

May I never encounter this situation.

WranglerBrief8039:

Unfortunately, I’ve been the one on the chest for this. The sheer terror on the woman’s face was something else. Family finally let her go after 40 minutes.

© Photo: Puzzleheaded_Ask1816

#4

Commotio Cordis.
During normal heart rhythm there’s a 40 millisecond window (during the t wave) where a sudden physical impact to the chest can cause v-fib, cardiac arrest and death.
Happens to about 20 people per year, mostly in sports (ie. Baseball or hockey puck to the chest at exactly the wrong moment)

TabsAZ:

Was a famous incident of this a few years back with the NFL player Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills who went into cardiac arrest after being hit in just the right spot making a tackle during a game. He recovered over the subsequent year and was able to continue his career.

© Photo: jocax188723

#5

Theres a nerve that loops thru your hip and connects to your genitals. Its in a really safe spot but on the rare chance it gets damaged the best way to reach it is to cut your buttcheek off and then sew it back on.
The pudendal nerve. There are only 5 surgeon in all of north america that perform the surgery. So if you need your buttcheeks cut off and sewn back on you gottta wait a while and travel to do it. Good luck traveling back to where ya came from with that cheek.

Shinjitsu-:

We are so used to modern medicine we forget, our bodies are built to NOT be opened or come apart. The way humans have found ways to access the deepest parts of us is nuts. Like there’s a procedure to reach the base of the brain that cuts the top mandible clean off and splits the face bone in half, and they keep track of it all and reattach it after. 

© Photo: JP-0360

#6

Nobody who was born blind has ever gotten schizophrenia. Scientists aren’t sure why.

PLUMPUFFI:

I vaguely recall there is a condition that whilst not schizophrenia, born blind people can hallucinate seeing, and often quite well, think its double barrelled and begins with L, but will have to look….

birthdaycheesecake9:

I think they’d maybe track down someone who was already diagnosed with schizophrenia and then lost their vision.
I imagine the manner in which they lost their vision would matter a lot (e.g., injury to the visual cortex vs to the eye, trauma vs a disease or syndrome).

awildkylaappeared:

Hello, resident psychiatrist here. Anecdotal, but I had a patient with schizophrenia who took a firearm shot wound to the eye, then infection took the other eye out (brain unscathed). Sure enough, not being able to see made his paranoia worse. Though he had a small amount of insight into his hallucinations before the injury (hear a voice, see that nobody is in the room -> question the hallucination), without sight he could no longer even begin to differentiate what was reality and what was not. No matter how much we optimized his meds he just couldn’t come back from it. He was terrified.

© Photo: baco_wonkey

#7

Assuming proper treatment, most doctors would prefer to get HIV than become diabetic.

Bolognahole_Vers2:

HIV is more easily treatable, and causes less complications these days, than diabetes.

© Photo: icydragon_12

#8

The Placebo effect usually has a therapeutic effect on disease, even when the disease is entirely physiological, and even when you know the medication is a placebo.

#9

Terminal lucidity.

A very ill comatose or unresponsive patient who suddenly becomes awake, alert and talk interactive. Some will even be able to carry on conversations. It can last minutes to hours.

Inexperienced providers and family members often mistake this as “bouncing back” but instead is a sign of imminent death.

What’s really interesting is we have no idea how or why this happens.

Euphorbch:

I had a super cool chat with an Alzheimer’s patient very close to the end of his life where he was entirely lucid, and it remains one of the most intense?? incredible?? Moments of my life more than a decade later.
He used to cry for his (passed way) wife and call me Florence, and one night he’d called for his wife and I popped the lamp on and chatted to him for a minute to see if he wanted water etc, and then he said “oh, stay with me, I’m here, I’m here and usually I’m not, I know (wife) is [passed away] and I know your name is not Florence and I NEED you to stay with me while I’m here, please please please” and so we chatted about my life a little and his life and wife and kids a lot, and then about two hours later he told me he was going again and went back to how he usually was. He passed pretty shortly after. I cried the entire conversation and for about three days after it, and it will still make me cry if I think about it too hard. It was really awesome.

© Photo: Styphonthal2

#10

The external lining of the placenta (the part that makes the contact with the mother’s uterus) is a single giant cell with surface area of more than 10 m².

It’s a syncytium (a cell formed by the fusion of cells) formed by a protein that was incorporated in the mammalian genome from a retrovirus.

So 2 facts for one! Before we are born, we a have a cell big enough to cover a car and it is only possible because one of our ancestors had a viral infection that mutated one of it’s reproductive cells!

Pale_Alternative_537:

Is this also the case in other mammals?

no-more-throws:

Yes and no… Wildly enough rats, cats, cows have entirely different synctin proteins from entirely different ancient retroviral infections… It’s a magnificent case of convergent evolution.. Early mammals needed mechanisms to keep the embryo and the mother separated while having near seamless but controlled nutrient transfer, and many some half dozen viruses raised hands saying ‘say no more bud, I got just the right toolkit!’

© Photo: wi11forgetusername

#11

Rotationplasty. In some scenarios where above the knee amputation is required, rather than simply cutting off the whole limb, surgeons can reattach your foot to your thigh, backwards, so that your ankle joint can replace your knee and it will be easier to use a prosthetic leg.

Impossible_Bowler923:

How does it work with bending the foot down to the prosthetic like that? I mean, I’m sure any type of amputation surgery feels terrible and takes a lot of recovery, but the diagram I saw looks crazy, like. The foot can do that???

Toasterferret:

Yeah, the neurovascular bundle is kept intact, and the tendons/muscles from the front of the foot/shin get hooked up to the hamstrings, and the Achilles gets hooked up to the quads. So they have dorsiflexion still which is what gives them the ability to use the ankle as a pseudo-knee.

© Photo: rafters-

#12

One of the symptoms of receiving the wrong blood type in a transfusion is an impending sense of doom.

SnowedAndStowed:

Angor Animi is the medical term for a sense of impending doom. It’s most strongly associated with pulmonary embolisms but can be from a variety of things including transfusion reactions.

© Photo: hgravesc

#13

You have a tiny itty bitty crystal in your ear called otolith. It’s in a pool of gelatine substance, and surrounded by sensory hair cells. It is responsible for managing your balance, vertigo, detecting your head tilt, acceleration etc.

Sometimes it can move and “get stuck”, making you feel dizzy weirdly e.g. only when laying on a bed.

It’s also extremely easy to cure its misalignment, you can literally watch an instructional video and do it with a help of a friend.

chandrian7:

When my grandmother called me from the ER to tell me that my grandpa needed the crystals in his head realigned, I assumed she had talked to someone in the waiting room about it and I told her to just wait until the doctor tells them what’s wrong. She corrected me that it had been the doctor who told her this and, before googling, I thought that her doctor might be insane. Crazy stuff, bodies. 

© Photo: sztrzask

#14

Mittelschmerz.

Some women can feel the exact moment our follicle explodes and releases the egg during ovulation. Mine feels pretty painful but others just feel a pop 🍾.

cc_bcc:

I get this. Mines more of a deep ache vs a cork pop. Its annoyingly painful and uncomfortable, but also a useful data point to know where I’m at in my cycle.

© Photo: blueridge97

#15

The mitochondria (powerhouse of the cell) are almost certainly other organisms that integrated into our own cells during our evolutionary history, and have their own genome.

megabeano:

And isn’t mitochondrial dna only passed down from mothers? So we can trace matrilineal geneology very accurately by looking at that dna instead of what’s in your nuclei. It would be very very similar since I assume the only differences would come from mutations.

OP:

Correct; sperm have mitochondria, but very little mitochondrial DNA and what mtDNA it does have is largely degraded after fertilization, meaning that mtDNA is solely inherited from the egg.

mS0hungry:

Is this related to the shrinkage and potential loss of the Y-chromosome?

OP:

Not really. Remember that sperm are roughly 50% X and 50% Y chromosomes, so anything Y-chromosome specific wouldn’t be related. Current theory is that because the mitochondria in sperm are specialized to provide movement for the sperm and are relatively unprotected from outside forces, there would be a higher risk of mtDNA damage, and therefore it was evolutionarily advantageous for the sperm’s mtDNA to degrade rapidly after fertilization.

© Photo: platinumarks

#16

Your Fallopian tubes aren’t fixed in place and may swap sides and attach to the corresponding ovary.

cherrycocoakoala:

True, plus they’re not physically attached to the ovary at all, they float near it and the ovary shoots out an egg into the gap, the egg is shot into the tube. People with one fallopian tube can still get pregnant from either ovary, the tube can move between them each month.

© Photo: colourhive

#17

If your veins are calcified enough, they will crunch like terracotta tubes being punctured when you get blood drawn.
No one prepares you for crunchy veins…

pinupcthulhu:

I’m going to regret asking this, but … What causes calcified veins?? 

haw35ome:

The obvious like high calcium, but also (and more commonly) high phosphorus in your blood. Unfortunately it’s in everything, but dark colored sodas & dairy have high levels of it. Healthy people can go about their lives just fine, just don’t have a diet of pure coke and cheese or something lol
Source: me, a dialysis patient – we need to watch out for this accumulating in our blood system (among many other levels, like potassium)

© Photo: Mercurial_Morals

#18

When you get a kidney transplant, they leave the old one in there and stick the new one in your pelvis. There are people walking around with three or four kidneys.

Jennacyde153:

My colleague’s dad just got 2 new ones so now he has 4. My kid only has 1 kidney but it’s as big as an adult kidney.

© Photo: common_sensei

#19

Your body can survive being cooled to 56.7°F (13.7°C), the lowest recorded human body temp, and make a near full recovery (Anna Bågenholm’s 1999 skiing accident case). Fun fact, doctors literally can’t declare someone [passed away] from hypothermia until they’re warmed to normal temp first.

FullMoonMooon:

You’re more likely to survive a drowning related cardiac arrest if it happens in cold water compared to warmer water. Submerging your face in water stimulates the mammalian diving reflex, which lowers your heart rate, and decreases your oxygen requirement —> less hypoxic brain and heart damage.
This is also useful for anxiety attacks. If you’re able to dunk your face in a bucket of cold water, it can help “reset” your hyperventilation. This can also be used to revert SVT (supraventricular tachycardia)

© Photo: Godzilla_GT01

#20

The “need to breathe” you feel when holding you breath is from an overabundance of CO2 in your lungs, not a lack of oxygen. In fact, your body has no way to tell you you’re not getting enough oxygen. Hypoxia is a thing, yes, but your ability to think and act is heavily impacted by that point.

tokke:

That’s why hyperventilating can be dangerous. It removes to much CO2 from your blood, but doesn’t provide enough oxygen to balance out. So after hyperventilating, if you would hold your breath you wouldn’t feel the need to breath until it might be to late. One of the dangers if you are freediving.

© Photo: BaldBandit

#21

The kids of identical twins are genetically half siblings.

wibblywobbly420:

If identical boys and identical girls both have kids together, their kids are genetically full siblings.

© Photo: Proud-Biscotti-6194

#22

I can’t believe this one needs to be said out loud, but vaccines do NOT in fact, cause autism.

#23

Ignaz Semmelweis was an austrian doctor who managed to reduce the mortality of women after birth from 12,3% to 1,27% simply by disinfecting hands and tools. 

And now comes the twist: people *hated* him for this. Some doctors managed to get him out of business in austria and it is even a theory that his death was a conspiracy. .

#24

Your lower eye lids have a little visible hole on the inside area that touches the bottom of the eye. This hole drains directly into the sinuses, and is the reason why sometimes when you messy cry your nose runs too.

#25

Chiropractic is bunk science. It is not regarded as a mainstream branch of medicine. The origins of chriopractic is wild. The fact that you can earn a doctorate in it is because of powerful lobbying.

The reason why people like going to a chiropractor is because getting your back cracked feels good. It’s also why they crack your back no matter what you are there for. You may feel better temporarily, but you are only treating the symptoms, not the cause like a physical therapist would do. And if you listen to the founder of chiropractic, joint manipulation can cure diseases, which is absurd.

#26

When surgeons cut part of the skull away to relieve brain swelling, they ‘store’ the piece of skull in the abdomen to keep it sterile. The skull fragment will be returned to its original place when the swelling has gone down.

My lecturer told us this yesterday and I find it amazing.

#27

Wart magic. Pediatricians would sometimes tell a child they had a magic pen and would draw a circle around the wart and the wart would die. It is believed the power of suggestion worked due to children’s strong imagination.

#28

Covid causes vascular, immune, and neurological injury. It’s not just a cold.

#29

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Antibiotics DOES NOT CURE common cold or general flu. Antibiotics only work against bacteria, NOT VIRUS.

#30

You’re somewhere between 3-7% virus DNA.

No, not 7% of your mass is virus, but your living bodily DNA is that of a virus.

#31

Most people don’t realize you can still get sun damage through glass. Windows block most UVB, but a lot of UVA gets through, which is the stuff that ages skin and can contribute to skin cancer risk.

#32

Anyone, after any sickness, has the ability to develop Guillain barre syndrome. Your immune system attacks sick cells and then keeps right on going destroying your healthy cells until you can’t use your limbs or lungs anymore. And then you can die.

#33

In people with auto brewery syndrome the body produces its own alcohol.

#34

Lots of people have extra bits inside them, or sometime missing bits, that they never know about and do them no harm until they have medical treatment that spots the ‘error’. FYI I have two renal arteries because i am a greedy git.

#35

Fatal Familial Insomnia. In this genetic disease you literally lose the ability to sleep until you die.

It starts with just normal sleeplessness but gets worse until your brain physically can’t enter deep sleep anymore. You end up hallucinating and having dementia like symptoms before passing away within a few months to a year. It is caused by prions which are misfolded proteins kind of like Mad Cow Disease but for humans.

It is super rare and only runs in about 70 families worldwide but it is honestly the scariest medical thing I have ever read about.

#36

You can live without a stomach, spleen, or gallbladder.

#37

You have invisible buttcheek swirls and stripes on your skin. They’re called Blaschko Lines. They’re believed to be the pathing cells took when they divide and grow into the skin you’re in now. Certain skin conditions follow these pathways on you body.

#38

I’m an EMT on the 911 side working with a medic, and I’ve witnessed a few things that sound straight up like fiction. I’ve had a couple patients who were in asystole (no heartbeat at all) suddenly get ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation).

In one case we worked the patient all the way to the hospital. We pushed epi and other meds en route, the ER team took over, ran lines, bagged them, did everything by the book… and nothing worked. Eventually the ER stopped, called time of death, and everyone stood down.

Then, minutes later, the patient had a heartbeat.
No shocks. No new meds. Nothing changed. They were dead, and then they weren’t.

It’s completely baffling to watch. No one in the room had a good explanation for it, and from what I understand, medicine doesn’t really have one either. It’s one of those things you see in this job that messes with your head, because it shouldn’t happen, but it absolutely does.

#39

Statistically speaking, people on average die more than once.

#40

Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) is a medical procedure that uses healthy donor stool to restore a patient’s gut microbiome.

Also, being a victim of Total Locked in Syndrome sounds horrifying.

#41

Humans literally glow (biologically), but our eyes can’t see it
Every cell in your body produces energy through chemical reactions involving oxygen. During these reactions, tiny amounts of light are released when excited molecules (especially from free radicals) return to a lower energy state. This phenomenon is called ultraweak visible light emission.
The light is real visible light, not heat or radiation.
It’s about 1,000 times weaker than what human eyes can detect.
Special ultra-sensitive cameras have photographed glowing human bodies in complete darkness.
Why it sounds fake:
We associate glowing with fireflies or sci-fi. But biologically, it’s just chemistry.
Why it’s true:
It’s a measurable byproduct of cellular metabolism and oxidative stress.

#42

Redheads need more anesthesia and Novocain.

#43

The brain has no pain receptors, this is how awake brain surgery is possible for certain tumors in very eloquent regions.

#44

Nobody really knows how anesthesia works. Only that it works.

#45

Voluntarily making a rumbling noise on my ears when I want to and it drowns most external noise. My family and friends did not believe me. Almost gaslit me into thinking its not real and that its just in my head. Years later I found a reddit community of other people being able to do it too. That was also when I found out that not everyone can control a certain muscle in the ear that causes the rumbling sound. Its very useful when people doesn’t wanna shut up. I call it my built in noise cancelling.

#46

A “Bogota Bag”.

A sterile plastic bag, from leftover medical supplies, can be sewn into human skin to create a temporary “skin” around abdominal wounds.

#47

Half of all doctors were below average in medical school.

#48

You can in fact die from literally drinking too much water in a short amount of time. Its called **Hyponatremia or water intoxication.** It usually affects high or extreme performance athletes who are unaware that they’ve taken in too much during their race (like triathlons etc).

#49

Your lung can just up and collapse without warning for no discernable reason. It’s called a spontaneous pneumothorax.

#50

Sitis Inversus is a rare medical condition where your internal organs are entirely mirrored. It presents no issues whatsoever until trying to diagnose something. For example, the telltale sign of appendicitis is pain in the lower right. Someone with sitis Inversus will have their appendix in the lower right, which is usually how it’s discovered.

#51

“Sickle Cell” anemia is a condition where your blood cells form a crescent instead of a donut shape. It’s a very painful disease and no known universal cure.

But if you have sickle cell, you’re immune to malaria.

#52

When anesthesia was invented for surgery, anesthesia wasn’t used on babies for a while due to people believing they don’t feel pain.

#53

Another one: While moving your eyes, you are blind, and your brain compensates so you don’t notice.

It’s called saccadic masking and you can easily try it by looking at yourself in the mirror, looking at your eyes back and forth, and it will look like your eyes don’t move. To compare with what it actually looks like, ask someone else to look at your eyes in the same way.

Evil bonus: I once convinced my little sister for a brief time that she was a clone and not a real human by exploting this. I told her she could not see her eyes moving in the mirror because they where actually cameras, not real eyes.

#54

EMDR. The fact that moving your eyes side to side a few times can reset me after a traumatic incident feels like a cheat code.

#55

Everybody has symbiotic parasites in their eyelashes.

Demodex folliculorium

Everyone.

Sweet dreams.

#56

After a traumatic event you can lower the chance of PTSD by playing Tetris.

#57

If you apply pressure to your eyeball, it can slow your heart rate. In extreme cases, this can cause the heart to stop (asystole). 

The oculocardiac reflex is mediated by the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve via ciliary ganglia and the vagus nerve.

#58

Mice and giraffes have the same amount of vertebrae in their necks.

#59

Broken heart syndrome.

#60

Your mind will “fill in the blanks” if it’s missing sensory input. For example, if you lose your hearing, your brain might tell you that you hear music. My grandmother lost her hearing, but was always asking if we were playing organ music. Nope. Her brain just decided that silence was icky, and switched over to the traditional church hymns station.

#61

No one actually knows how Lithium works as a medication…just that it does something sometimes for some people.

#62

Bones are naturally wet.

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