The Middle Wife

It was time for show-n-tell and Erica, a very bright, outgoing seven-year-old, came to the front of the class with a pillow stuffed under her sweater.

She held up a snapshot of an infant. 'This is Luke, my baby brother, and I'm going to tell you about his birthday."

“First, Mom and Dad made him as a symbol of their love, and then Dad put a seed in my Mom's stomach, and Luke grew in there. He ate for nine months through an umbrella cord.”

She's stood there with her hands on the pillow, and the teacher was trying not to laugh and wishing she had her camcorder that day. The kids were watching her in amazement.

'Then, about two Saturdays ago, my Mom started saying and going, 'Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!” Erica put a hand behind her back and groaned.

“She walked around the house for, like an hour, 'Oh, oh, oh!” Now Erica is doing a hysterical duck walk and groaning.

'My Dad called the middle wife. She delivers babies, but she doesn't have a sign on the car like the Domino's man. They got my Mom to lie down in bed like this.' (Then Erica lies down with her back against the wall.)

"And then, pop! My Mom had this bag of water she kept in there in case he got thirsty, and it just blew up and spilled all over the bed, like psshhheew!' (Now Erica has her legs spread with her little hands miming water flowing away. It was too much!)

'Then the middle wife starts saying 'push, push,' and 'breathe, breathe.’

They started counting, but never even got past ten. Then, all of a sudden, out comes my brother. “

“He was covered in yucky stuff that they all said was from Mom's play-center, (placenta) so there must be a lot of toys inside there. When he got out, the middle wife spanked him for crawling up in there.”

Then Erica stood up, took a big theatrical bow and returned to her seat.

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Another teacher sent me this story and I am still laughing about it. I couldn’t resist posting it here. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Pain Perception

• Human beings at large differ in how sensitive they are to pain. Much of the variation is apparently random. But gender matters. Women tend to hurt more than men do. Ethnicity can also interface with ache; some ethnic groups are more tolerant of discomfort than others are.
• In the past few years researchers have begun unraveling the genetic roots of these differences. They are also pinpointing social, cultural and psychological components that play parts in pain sensitivity.
• Assessing patients’ vulnerability to anguish may be essential to accurately judging the severity of their condition. It is also critical to deciding how to treat individuals’ pain. Revealing the molecular causes of individual variation in pain perception is already providing potential targets for novel pain medications.

One day as a child Billy Smith (not his real name), a resident of Newfoundland, could not take off his shoe. No amount of twisting or tugging would loosen its grip on his foot. The reason for his struggle eventually surfaced: a nail had pierced the sole and entered Smith’s flesh, tightly binding the two. Removing the nail freed the foot, but solving that problem only underscored a bigger one: Smith had not noticed.

Smith is among a tiny cluster of people, fewer than 30 in the world, who harbor a genetic quirk that renders them incapable of perceiving pain . “These humans are completely healthy, of normal intelligence, but don’t know what pain is,” says clinical geneticist C. Geoffrey Woods, who studied a group of such patients from northern Pakistan. They can sense touch, heat, vibration and their body’s position in space. Yet for them, root canals are painless, as are falls, fires and whacks on the head with a baseball bat. One woman with so-called congenital indifference to pain (CIP) delivered a baby without discomfort.



Link
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=i-do-not-feel-your-pain



DIFFERENT ARTICLE:
Link

http://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/knocking-out-redheads/
Did you know that people with red hair need more anesthesia during surgery than other people?
Dozens of studies have shown that it takes about twenty-percent more anesthesia to knock out redheads than it does people with other hair colors. It’s all got to do with pigment, which are the particles that determine the color of hair and skin.
The amount of pigment you have is controlled by a hormone in the brain. Redheads have more of this hormone – and that matters because the pigment hormone is also involved with pain perception.
For some reason, because redheads have an abundance of this pigment hormone, they’re more sensitive to pain, which is why it takes more anesthesia to knock them out. But if you are a redhead, there’s no need to worry about waking up during surgery, screaming in pain. Surgeons and anesthesiologists are well aware of the phenomenon.
Medscape Link

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/487261

The Placebo Effect

I was amazed when I read this article in Neurology.

Doctors and scientists used to believe that a placebo, sometimes called a sugar pill, had the ability to change the perception of the patient but had no real healing effect. In other words, it had no medicine therefore it changed nothing physically within the patient.

Now they have learned that a placebo can have a physical effect on a patient. PET scans have now confirmed that some patients get better just because they expect to. This particular article refers to patients with Parkinson's, depression, and pain. Patients who received a medication and patients who received a placebo had the SAME changes in their brain on PET scans. WOW!

"It seems that the expectation of benefit activates the same natural pathways in the brain as medications. If we could harness these same mechanisms in the clinic, patients could help themselves without the side effects of medications."

That's pretty amazing, although I should not be surprised -- God created us and and in so many ways, our physical bodies are a wonderful and complicated mystery.

Here is the link if you want to read the full article.

I just started reading another article about red-heads and physical pain. I hope to post conclusions from that one soon.