I Heart Guts » Modern Medicine

Guts Popping Up!

gutsy — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:40:08 +0000

Whether you love Valentine’s Day or loathe it, we still want you to visit our gutsy pop-up shops! We’ve got three special spots where you can score Guts in person — our pals at Munky King in Los Angeles, Trohv D.C. and Trohv Baltimore will be carrying the full I Heart Guts lineup for two weeks Feb. 1-14. Best of all? Your guts can actually do some good — 10% of sales will go toward a local clinic, Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic, George Washington University’s HEALing Clinic in D.C., and Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute in Baltimore. Perhaps you want to say urine love with a kidney, or give your heart, or show someone how much you heart their guts, or maybe you’re just tired of teddy bears, chocolate and roses, but for whatever reason, stop by and pay your guts a visit!

Heart Murmur

gutsy — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:22:59 +0000

It took blood, sweat, and, yes, a few tears, to put together a real honest-to-goodness paper I Heart Guts wholesale catalog and here it is, ready to go to the New York International Gift Fair in January, our first show of the year. We’re actually at booth #30002 in “New York’s Newest” at Pier 92, which is sort of a holding-zone for new people at the show. Anyway, I’m excited to finally have a real catalog, so if your store needs one, contact us and we’ll mail you one! It’s even sorta semi-educational, you can learn a little bit about the thymus and other wonderful glands on the lapel pin page!

Warms the Cockles

gutsy — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:46:58 +0000

The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices lost its leader last year when founder Bob McCoy passed away in May of last year. Before donating his collection to the Science Museum of Minnesota in 2002, McCoy had the good sense to create an online archive of “the world’s most inane and useless information about how to cure…what may ail you,” which includes the Prostate Gland Warmer (pictured), Foot-operated breast enlarger pump, and phlebotomy (bloodletting) and phrenology (the study of head bumps to determine personality).

Organs to Live By

gutsy — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:47:02 +0000

Looking toward a future of total bodily replacement with machines, website Io9 has a roundup of organs that can be replaced with synthetic versions, including kidneys via dialysis and the J-pouch, which acts as a “surrogate colon.” The article, entitled “How Many of Your Internal Organs Can You Live Without?”, doesn’t go into the gallbladder and spleen, the two organs you actually can live without, or the thyroid, which can be replaced with meds. {artificial heart illustration by Mike Altman}

Sweet as Sugar

gutsy — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:43:24 +0000

Being a kid with type 1 diabetes is a lot tougher than not having cake and ice cream whenever you want. Imagine not being able to spend the night at a friend’s house because an adult needs to monitor your glucose levels so that you won’t have major health complications. Imagine pricking your finger several times a day to check your blood sugar levels. Imagine wearing a pump and a glucose monitor all day every day. What you are imagining is a day in the life of seven-year-old Jillian Rater. The Council Bluffs, Iowa, native recently took a trip with other children from 50 states and 7 countries to rally congress into supporting research and funding to fight type 1 diabetes. About 3 million Americans are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which means the body doesn’t produce insulin, and it affects 3 million Americans and about 215,000 kids, according to the American Diabetes Association. As you may recall, the pancreas makes insulin, which regulates one’s blood sugar. If the ol’ panky’s not working, then insulin must be monitored and injected to keep blood sugar from getting too high or too low. That’s Jillian there with Crystal Bowersox, an American Idol finalist who also has type 1 diabetes, and Representative Steve King of Iowa. We love that Jillian included her favorite pancreas pal, named “Panky,” in her photos. We’re rooting for you, Jillian, and the hundreds of thousands of gutsy kids who are our heroes every day. Let’s hope the gut-wrenching tales from all these cute kids testifying at the Capitol will help sweeten the deal for projects in the works such as the artificial pancreas.

Will Kidney for iPad

gutsy — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 19:36:25 +0000

What would it take to get you to give up one of your kidneys? A small car? A trip to Fiji? The health of someone you love? For one young man in China, all he needed in exchange for his kidney was an iPad 2. That, and $3,400 bucks. Folks are having a field day on Twitter, here are some of my favorite tweets: “He should’ve waited for the iPad 3″ by @therealnickmack and “I’ve had a productive week, Got a new Kidney and managed to get rid of a faulty iPad” by @sickipediabot.

Medical Marvels

gutsy — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:01:12 +0000

Fascinating conference alert: Annual American Association for the History of Medicine Meeting starts up tomorrow in Philly, check out the panels and papers here or on Morbid Anatomy. Who wouldn’t want to sit in on sessions such as “Disease in the Middle Ages: Goiter, Lupus, and Anxiety” or hear papers like “Salvage Mission: The Lobotomized Patients of the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu Psychiatric Hospital in Montreal” or talks such as “Osler and the Sanitary Movement with a Scatological Guide to Loos, Privies, and Crappers”? Wish we were going! Illustration by Marc Jean Bourgery from the John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa.

Our Daily Meds

gutsy — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 02:18:08 +0000

Check out the daily doses of meds by a bunch of different post-op transplant recipients, who must take pills by the bucketload to keep their bodies from rejecting the donor organs. This here is Jaden with the medications he must take daily for the rest of this life (he had a liver transplant six months ago). Other absolutely fascinating photos posted on The Waiting List’s Facebook page.

My Plastic Heart

gutsy — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 18:37:28 +0000

Polymeric embalming turns human internal organs into a sort these sort of beef-jerky-like plastic things that can be used in medical schools and the like. These plastinated organ photos from the International Morphological Centre in Russia are pretty fascinating — who knew lungs, when dried, look so much like broccoli?

Organs at the Office

gutsy — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:08:17 +0000

These body parts are part of the campaign for Actos, a drug that controls type 2 diabetes. From left to right, that’s muscle, pancreas, liver, triglyceride, HDL-C, kidney and stomach. Check out all the crazy pharmaceutical swag available on eBay!