Many of you have written in to suggest making some sort of graphic showing where all the guts and glands live in the body, and I’ve finally gotten around to creating one. It’s even got rollovers so you can learn more about, say, your pineal gland, should you have time to squander. For the purposes of simplicity, we’ve made the body a hermaphrodite — she’s got a uterus to go with her prostate and testes! We’ll call her/him Hermie.
“What a surgeon does to a patient — if it were done without consent — would be a felony.” surgeon and inventor Dr. Catherine Mohr tells TED in a fascinating podcast about the past, present and future of surgery. Learn about the brutalities of old-school surgery, performed without anesthesia and often without even clean hands, and familiarize yourself with surgery’s robotic future. This skull dates back 5,000-10,000 years, waaay before aseptic surgical techniques and certainly way before anesthetics. The crazy thing? Anthropologists have determined that from the healing seen on this trephinated skull that the “patient” actually survived this brutal and crude brain surgery. The surgical future includes amazing things like repairing the heart without cracking the ribcage.
Considering the fact that I look at internal organs all day long for a living, my score on the name all the internal organs in four minutes quiz is shamefully bad. I only got 15 out of 24 total organs, isn’t that pathetic? Granted, it was mainly because I didn’t really read the directions and forgot to pluralize things like parathyroids and ovaries (and jeez, who knew the esophagus would be included, but skin wouldn’t? And they rejected spelling gallbladder as one word. I say, look it up in the dictionary, bitches). Anyway, learn from my mistakes, pluralize, and take the quiz. The clock does start ticking right away, so be ready to go when you click on the link and don’t dawdle like I did.
Though we still haven’t managed to get an actual booth at this year’s Comic-Con (drat!), the guts will still be there via our wonderful distributor, DKE Toys. Go visit their booth and you’ll get a sneak peek at something special — testicle, ovary, mammary and prostate (pictured) plushies by I Heart Guts, slated to come out in 2010. Go on and meet ‘em in person! And hopefully we’ll be there next year.
It’s never a good idea to wander the aisles of your local health food store when you’re not feeling 100%, because next thing you know, you’re wondering if your adrenal glands are making you feel tired, or perhaps you need a little something to detoxify that liver of yours. On my last voyage to Whole Foods, I was impressed to learn there’s a supplement for practically every organ and gland in the human body — Mammary and Uterus Care Tea, Thymus Natural Glandular, Thyroid Energy — you name it, they’ve got it. Call these supplements life-savers or a total waste of time, they are still pretty interesting either way. For you skeptics out there, consider that many modern pharmaceuticals are based on these very same herbs and plants, or think also about the workings of the placebo effect. For the converts, consider the fact that none of this stuff is regulated by the FDA (not that the FDA knows everything).
We’ve got a couple of sparkly new tees coming in today, both with fabulous metallic inks, we hope you’ll like ‘em. The first, barely in time for Valentine’s Day, is a Heart of Gold tee, for ladies only. Quite possibly even more exciting is our new guts and glands shirt, which includes all the guts and glands characters — even testicles! For those of you really wanting to wear your prostate on your sleeve, this is the shirt for you. They are sorta arrayed where they are supposed to go, offering a mini-anatomy refresher when you need it.
Our in-house selection committee member (pictured) randomly picked the two lucky winners of our gland magnet contest — Elizabeth of Michigan and Joanne of Winnipeg! Congrats, ladies. Joanne works in pediatric endocrinology, so she is extra excited to get her happy glands on. Thanks to everyone who played! We hope to have another contest soon, so come back soon.
You weirdos asked for ‘em and now we have ‘em — glands! Brand-new gland-filled sticker packs are in the house and ready to go home with you. Fun, colorful and oversized, these endocrine-friendly stixs are perfect for decorating your stuff or reminding you exactly what on earth your pineal gland does (produces melatonin, that delightful sleep-inducing hormone). Whether you’re studying up on your endocrinology or just feeling hormonal, you need yourself some glands. In my head, all the glands were sort of undifferentiated blob-shaped sacks, but of course they all have their own wonderful special shapes unique to them. I’ll admit I was skeptical about how cute a testicle could be (he’s the blue one to the left), but I’ve warmed up to him.
You weirdos asked for ‘em and now we have ‘em — glands! Brand-new gland-filled sticker packs are in the house and ready to go home with you. Fun, colorful and oversized, these endocrine-friendly stixs are perfect for decorating your stuff or reminding you exactly what on earth your pineal gland does (produces melatonin, that delightful sleep-inducing hormone). Whether you’re studying up on your endocrinology or just feeling hormonal, you need yourself some glands. In my head, all the glands were sort of undifferentiated blob-shaped sacks, but of course they all have their own wonderful special shapes unique to them. I’ll admit I was skeptical about how cute a testicle could be (he’s the blue one to the left), but I’ve warmed up to him.
Cancer is no laughing matter, but we’d like to give props to City of Hope’s Underwear Affair campaign, which draws attention to the unpleasant and often-ignored diseases that develop beneath one’s drawers by getting people to drop them — or at least run around in their undies. We’re not talking STDs, but cancer of the prostate, colon, cervix, kidney, bladder, testicles, ovaries and uterus. Anyway, should you want see lots of skin while supporting research for these forms of cancer, go check out the 10k run tomorrow at the La Brea Tar Pits, 3pm.
