I tried to make an alphabetical guts placemat for my two-year-old son, hoping to include every organ and gland we have around here. I got stuck after a while, though, once it dawned on me that spleen, sebaceous, stomach, sweat gland and salivary glands were going to make it very difficult to place all those guts. So I just made a placemat of of all the guts, alphabet be damned. I’ll letcha know how much information he actually absorbs as he flings food all over it.
Posts Tagged ‘doctor’
Eating Guts
Posted: Wednesday, November 11th, 2009Swine Flu Rap
Posted: Friday, October 9th, 2009Yesterday I was planning on writing about MC Spleen, a French rapper and beat-boxer extraordinaire with a great name. But almost better than a rhymer named after everyone’s favorite lymph organ is Dr. John Clarke, the medical director for New York’s Long Island Railroad who recently won a contest put on by the Center for Disease Control to create an infectious public service announcement about H1N1 flu. New York magazine gives him props for rhyming “hand sanitizer” with “I advise ya,” and when I heard him on NPR yesterday he also rapped about asthma, with an impressive integration of icky lyrics about mucous.
Gland Focus: The Good Ol' Parathyroid!
Posted: Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
Not many folks know what the parathyroid is or does until — as with pretty much everything within our bodies — something goes wrong. Parathyroid hormones regulate calcium in the blood, which affects bone growth among other things. Folks with elevated amounts of the hormone have trouble with, according to Popular Science magazine, “stones (kidney stones), bones (fractures), moans (psychiatric problems) and groans (constipation).” A surprising new way to deal with parathyroid imbalance involves autotransplantation — instead of getting someone else’s parathyroid (rejection is always a problem), they take yours out, then put it back. Sometimes they even put it back in your arm rather than in your neck, where it belongs. Isn’t that amazing?
