in 1976, congress passed the hyde amendment, which barred the federal government from using medicaid to fund abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother.

folks in japan have been wearing surgical masks in public for a number of reasons since 1918, but it became commonplace in 2009 with the onset of h1n1. japanese consumers spent us$333 billion on disposable face masks in 1918.

sphagnum moss is a better medical dressing than cotton. it is naturally antiseptic and is twice as absorptive.

7 year old stella berndtsson drowned in icy water on 12/23/10. her body's temperature was 13°celsius/55.4°fahrenheit when rescue workers discovered it more than 3 hours after she died. she was successfully revived via slow warming and standard resuscitation methods.

in the 1940's and 1950's, an american doctor named walter freeman traveled the country lobotomizing mental patients with an ice pick - sometimes as many as 25 a day. he performed the procedure on rosemary kennedy, the older sister of future president john kennedy, because her father thought she was unruly. rosemary became essentially a vegetable for the remainder of her life.

freeman called the station wagon that he traveled in the lobotomobile.

in the u.s., 1 out of 4 adults who went to the emergency room for sprained ankles were prescribed opiates.

the creator of chiropractic treatment considered declaring it a religion, and claimed that he got the idea from 'the other world'.

queen victoria is the reason that women were first allowed to have painkillers during childbirth. before she gave birth to her 7th child, christian men objected to the idea, because the bible contains the passage, 'in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children'. no one dared to contradict her when she asked for chloroform to ease her pain.

i in 5 americans (43 million people) have unpaid medical debt.

in the u.s., to increase profitability, insurance companies cover fewer and fewer conditions, and pay less for each treatment than in the past. in addition, the portion of a typical medical bill paid by the insurance company has dropped from 90% to 70%, with the patient billed for the difference. this is a large part of why the most common cause for bankruptcy in the u.s. is unpaid medical bills.

since 2010, 81 rural hospitals in the u.s. have closed. an additional 673 are at risk of closing.

almost 30 million people in the u.s. don't live within an hour of a hospital that provides trauma care. as a result, the death rate is twice as high in those areas.

more than half of rural counties in the u.s. don't have a hospital where women can deliver a baby.

the average doctor in the u.s. makes twice as much as a doctor in the next closest country.

practitioners of 'therapeutic touch' are only correct in their 'location of human energy fields' about 44% of the time. that's right - flipping a quarter is more accurate. because it's a con.

james barry was the first doctor in england to successfully perform a cesarean section, and eventually became inspector general of the british army. what no one knew until 100 years later was that barry was a woman named margaret ann bulkley, who lived as a man for 56 years (until she died) and was the first woman to graduate from a british medical college. we didn't know until 100 years later because the british army kept it a secret.

in texas, prison inmates have to pay for any medical care that is not an emergency or to treat a chronic condition.

if you are diagnosed with a disease that affects 1 in 1,000 people, and the test that is used to determine whether or not someone has the disease works 98% of the time (surprise! no test works 100% of the time), the odds of the test being wrong are higher than the odds that you have the disease. that's why your doctor will have the test performed more than once - to make sure that the error is more likely than the disease. this may also be why some folks report 'miracle cures' - simply not understanding how medical testing works.

many american citizens who live near the mexican border cross over to receive medical and dental care, which costs a fraction of what it does in the u.s.

a commonly suggested 'cure' for unruly children or wives that refused to do housework in the 1940's was a frontal lobotomy.