Category: Medical

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Worst Name for a Common Affliction

As many as one out of every 50 people have mild prosopagnosia, in which they have more trouble recognizing faces than everyone else. You may have it if you fail to recognize someone you know in a new hat, or having shaved off a beard.

A more severe form of the disease, typically brought on by a minor stroke, can happen in which the victim can no longer recognize faces. These patients can tell they are seeing someone’s face, but they cannot tell whose it is, even if the person is a close friend or relative.

If you have a new friend who fails to recognize you, don’t get mad, get even. Wait, that’s not right. Just realize that the person may have prosopagnosia.

More About Prosopagnosia

You can fail to recognize yourself in the mirror. In severe cases, people with prosopagnosia (face blindness) don’t recognize their own reflection. They might see a person looking back at them, try to fix their hair or adjust a collar, and only realize it’s their own face because the image moves at the exact same millisecond.

Oliver Sacks famously mistook his own reflection for a stranger. The renowned neurologist—who wrote extensively about brain anomalies in books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—suffered from prosopagnosia himself. He once apologized to a man in a restaurant for nearly bumping into him, only to realize he was speaking to a large mirror.

It isn’t a problem with vision. Prosopagnosics usually have normal visual acuity and can see the individual parts of a face—eyes, nose, mouth—just fine. The brain simply fails to “stitch” those features together into a cohesive, recognizable identity (a process called holistic face processing).

People rely on “stealth tracking” techniques. To navigate social life without offending people, individuals with prosopagnosia rely heavily on non-facial identifiers: unique voice cadence, distinct hairstyles, walk/gait, specific shoes, tattoos, or distinctive jewelry. If a close friend drastically cuts their hair or changes their style, they may suddenly become a total stranger.

Watching movies can be an absolute nightmare. Following complex film plots is uniquely difficult when multiple characters share similar physical builds, skin tones, or hair colors. Fans with face blindness often rely on sub-titles, distinct costuming, or audio descriptions to keep track of who is talking to whom.

There’s a subtype where you can’t even tell faces apart from non-faces. While visual prosopagnosia specifically impacts recognizing individual faces, extreme apperceptive prosopagnosia makes it hard to even distinguish a face from an arbitrary object, like seeing facial patterns in a building front or cloud formation.

It can be built-in or acquired. Congenital (developmental) prosopagnosia is present from birth without any obvious brain damage, often running in families. Acquired prosopagnosia happens suddenly after stroke, traumatic brain injury, or encephalitis damaging the fusiform gyrus (the brain’s face-processing hub).

You can suffer from “developmental prosopagnosia” for decades without knowing it. Because people born with it have never experienced face recognition, many assume everyone relies on context, hair, or voice to identify people. It’s common for individuals to reach middle age before discovering that typical brains recognize faces instantly and automatically.

It can affect how you see animals. For some people with prosopagnosia, the impairment extends to other categories where fine-grained visual distinction within a group is required. Dog show judges or sheep farmers with the condition, for instance, may struggle to tell individual animals in a herd or breed apart.

The direct opposite condition exists (“Super-Recognizers”). On the exact opposite end of the spectrum are super-recognizers—people who can see a face once in a crowd, brief background footage, or a grainy security video, and reliably recognize that same face decades later. Many police forces around the world actively recruit them for security and surveillance roles.

Your author has mild prosopagnosia.

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Worst Thing to Give to Children

If you filled trucks with all the candy American kids eat in one year, they would line up bumper to bumper from San Diego to San Francisco.

Sugar is highly addictive. Some have said it’s more addictive than cocaine. Speaking of cocaine, some have said that overcoming an addition to sugar is even more difficult than an addition to cocaine.

Sugar is strongly implicated in numerous scientific studies covering a wide range of diseases from high blood pressure to cancer and especially diabetes.

The number of children and young adults afflicted with diabetes and blood pressure has skyrocketed since the increase of sugar in the standard American diet.

Starchy foods aren’t much better. If you eat bread, pies, cake or anything of that sort, your digestive process converts it to sugar.

Soft drinks have an amazing 10 or more teaspoons of sugar dissolved in every can.

What about fruit juice? Nope, not good either. Although natural juices don’t contain sucrose – table sugar – fruit sugars without their roughage are nearly as deadly.

Yeah, deadly. The problem is most people don’t recognize sugar as deadly because it isn’t a quick acting poison. People don’t eat a fudge brownie and fall over dead. It’s insidious because the death cames slowly yet painfully, usually, but not always after 40 or more years.

How about sugar substitutes? Things like corn syrup or honey have the same effect as other types of sugar.

However, there are two products that can satisfy in the same way as sugar, yet they are not sugars and contain no calories. Those are stevia and monk fruit.

You’ll find stevia often served in little packets in restaurants and cafes where the management is trying to think of their patrons’ health. If you read the small print on the packets of stevia, you may be shocked to discover the actual amount of stevia is slight. The packet mostly contains fillers such as Erythritol. Some manufacturers even mix their stevia with dextrose or sucrose – sugar.

Why would they do that? Because stevia is 200 to 300 times sweeter than table sugar. Although rare, you can buy pure stevia on Amazon and elsewhere. You would be amazed at how little is needed to sweeten a food or beverage.

The taste of stevia or monk fruit is so close to sugar that if you use it as a sugar substitute, children will not detect the difference, but they are likely to live longer and healthier.

As one who has overcome a sugar addiction, it wasn’t as hard as they say, I have noticed that I have more consistent energy. I used to get suddenly tired, sometimes even dizzy after short bursts of exertion. For instance, I might have to sit out every other game of pickleball. Now, I can play for hours at a time with no sugar bonk.

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Worst Battle With a Cat

If you need to give liquid medicine to a cat, don’t try to feed it to the cat. This would only result in a battle. Instead, spill the medicine on the kitty’s fur. The cat will lick it off in the process of cleaning.

Some Facts About Cats

Cats can make over 100 different sounds. While dogs only produce around 10 distinct vocalizations, cats use a vast repertoire of meows, purrs, chirps, trills, hisses, and snarls. Intriguingly, adult cats rarely meow at other cats—they developed the meow primarily as a custom frequency to communicate with humans.

They have a extra scent organ on the roof of their mouth. Known as the vomeronasal or Jacobson’s organ, this system allows cats to “taste” scents in the air. When a cat curls its lip and sneers after smelling something strong (a reaction called the Flehmen response), it is routing molecules to this organ for deeper analysis.

Cats cannot taste sweetness. Due to a genetic mutation that occurred early in the evolution of the feline family, cats lack the functional taste receptor proteins required to detect sweet flavors. As obligate carnivores, their palates are strictly wired for amino acids and fats.

Their purr frequency may promote bone and tissue healing. Domestic cats purr at a frequency between 20 Hz and 150 Hz. In human medicine, sound frequencies within this exact range are known to improve bone density, repair tendons, and ease muscle strain, suggesting a purr might double as an internal self-repair mechanism.

Cats spend nearly 70% of their lives sleeping. An average domestic cat sleeps between 12 and 16 hours a day, and older cats can sleep up to 20 hours. This trait is inherited from their wild ancestors, who needed to conserve energy for explosive bursts of high-speed hunting.

A cat’s nose print is as unique as a human fingerprint. The pattern of ridges, bumps, and slits on a cat’s nose pad is entirely unique to that individual. No two cats share the exact same nose print design.

They walk like camels and giraffes. Cats are “direct register” walkers and share a rare gait pattern known as pacing with camels and giraffes. They move both right legs forward together, followed by both left legs. When stepping forward, a cat’s hind paws land almost perfectly in the exact footprint left by its front paws, minimizing noise and visible tracks.

Cats do not have collarbones. Unlike humans, a cat’s clavicle is not anchored to other bones; it is suspended in muscle. This floating collarbone allows their shoulders to collapse inward, enabling them to squeeze through any opening that is wide enough to fit their head.

They have an extra eyelid. Cats possess a translucent “third eyelid” called a nictitating membrane, located in the inner corner of each eye. This thin layer sweeps across the eye to protect it from debris and keep it moist without requiring the cat to fully close its eyes.

A group of cats is called a “clowder.” While a group of kittens born together is a litter, a gathering of adult cats is known as a clowder (or alternatively, a glaring or a pounce).

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Most Annoying Disease

Have you ever had the disease, acute nasopharyngitis? That is the common cold. It may be less serious than many other diseases, but it certainly makes the most people temporarily miserable.

It Isn’t Just One Virus—It’s Over 200

The “common cold” isn’t a single illness; it is an umbrella term for infections caused by more than 200 different viruses. Rhinoviruses are responsible for about 30% to 50% of cases, but coronaviruses, adenoviruses, and enteroviruses can all produce identical symptoms.

Your Own Immune System Causes the Symptoms, Not the Virus

The runny nose, sore throat, and sneezing aren’t direct damage caused by the virus itself. They are the result of your immune system releasing inflammatory chemicals (like histamines and cytokines) to fight off the invader.

Being Cold Doesn’t Directly Give You a Cold

Mom was slightly off: going outside with wet hair or without a jacket won’t magically spawn a virus. However, cold, dry air does weaken the immune defenses inside your nasal passages and allows cold viruses to replicate more efficiently in chilled nasal tissues.

You Can Spread It Before You Even Feel Sick

You can shed the virus and infect others roughly 24 hours before your first symptom appears. You remain contagious for up to a week, usually peaking during the first 2–3 days of feeling sick.

Cold Viruses Can Survive for Hours on Surfaces

Rhinoviruses can live on hard surfaces like door handles, light switches, and phone screens for up to 24 hours. If you touch a contaminated surface and then touch your eyes, nose, or mouth, you can contract the virus without anyone coughing directly on you.

You spent Years of Your Life Sick

The average adult catches 2 to 3 colds per year, while children can catch 6 to 8. Given that an average cold lasts about 7 to 10 days, the average human spends between 1 and 2 full years of their life dealing with cold symptoms.

Chicken Soup Actually Has Scientific Backing

It’s not just comfort food: laboratory studies show that chicken soup acts as a mild anti-inflammatory by inhibiting the movement of neutrophils (white blood cells that trigger inflammation). The warm vapor also speeds up mucus clearance in the nasal passages.

A Single Sneeze Can Travel 100 MPH

A forceful sneeze can propel up to 40,000 microscopic fluid droplets into the air at speeds up to 100 miles per hour, spreading viral particles across a distance of over 20 feet.

Space Travel Suppresses Cold Viruses… Until You Return

Astronauts rarely get colds while aboard the International Space Station because the environment is isolated from outside germs. However, the stress of re-entry and spaceflight can temporarily suppress the immune system, leaving astronauts particularly susceptible to colds upon landing back on Earth.

Echinacea and Vitamin C Won’t Stop a Cold in Its Tracks

Despite being multi-million-dollar industry staples, extensive scientific reviews show that taking Vitamin C or Echinacea after symptoms start does not significantly shorten or cure a cold. Regular Vitamin C intake before getting sick only slightly reduces symptom duration in high-stress athletes.