What's Wrong With You?: An Insider's Guide To Your Insides

by Sarah Holper

Overview

Take a tour through your body and its common medical symptoms with What's Wrong with You? an insider's guide for anybody with a body – particularly one that itches, aches, or malfunctions.

Over a billion health-related Google searches – more than one in every 15 Google enquiries – are made every day. Ask Dr. Google about your headache and it will spew forth a useless list of possible diagnoses (invariably topped by brain cancer). But dubious diagnostic labels just aren't satisfying. What people really want to know is: why am I feeling like this? What's actually going on in my body to make me feel like this?

In What's Wrong With You? Dr. Sarah Holper takes you on a tour through the human body, explaining the reason for common medical symptoms that cause concern. With interesting facts, personal anecdotes, insider doctor secrets and memorable patient encounters spread throughout this book, Dr. Holper lends her working knowledge to those seeking to understand just what's going on inside and outside their bodies.

This guide will not try to diagnose you. Rather, it will arm you with the knowledge you need to understand why your body reacts to illness the way it does.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781743797112
Publisher:	Hardie Grant
Publication date:	08/31/2021
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dr. Sarah Holper is a neurology doctor and passionate communicator, who has published research on the impenetrability of the writing of doctors and academics and how poor communication can jeopardize patient care. Dr. Holper served as medical adviser for David Astle's popular science book 'Rewording the Brain' and she devised a world-first study identifying the brain region responsible for the 'aha!' moment when cracking a crossword clue. Over the past decade Dr. Holper has worked in more than a dozen hospitals in rural towns and city centers. She has cared for thousands of patients, given thousands of explanations and answered thousands of questions. Patients have commended her ability to 'explain things in plain English', though her puns have received variable reviews.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Brain 5

Headache: how to make your brain squeeze out the base of your skull, and why sex can make you feel like you've been hit over the head with a baseball bat. 7

Jet Lag and Your Body Clock: how a partial brain transplant between hamsters explains why you feel crummy stepping off an international flight. 21

Fever: how you can treat a patient with syphilis by infecting them with malaria, and why the jazz hit 'Fever' terrifies doctors. 33

Yawning: during which you will almost certainly feel an irrepressible urge to yawn. 48

Head 59

Balding: how removing the testicles prevents balding, and why Caesar really wore laurel wreaths. 61

Earache: methods to age a whale via earwax, and how humans invented floppy-eared dogs. 75

Hearing Loss: what? 85

Nosebleeds: the one thing you never want trapped up your nose, and the one time that Ralph Wiggins was right. 101

Mouth and Throat 113

Bad Breath: what it means if your breath smells like nail polish remover, fish, or the carcass of a dead horse. 115

Taste and Smell (Loss Of): the curious reason why John Harvey Kellogg deliberately made corn flakes taste bland, and the one meal astronauts are obsessed with eating while in orbit. 128

Voice (Loss Of): discover what happens when a child accidentally inhales a goose's voice box. 142

Acid Reflux: the mechanism by which you die if molten gold is poured into your throat, and why reflux feels like this. 155

Cough: learn how to interpret a cough that sounds like a honking Canada goose, and discover the most depressing way to die on New Year's Eve. 167

Guts 177

Nausea and Vomiting: including a blow-by-blow description of death from oesophageal rupture secondary to prodigious spewing. 179

Diarrhoea: how to assess toilet flush strength, and what happens when you give a fraudulent cancer diagnosis to a medical student while probing his rectum. 194

Farts and Burps: why a fart is never your fault, and what the colour of your ignited fart's flame tells you about your gut bacteria. 206

Urine Upsets: why you shouldn't drink your urine, eat yellow snow, or believe people who market bottled water. 220

Skin 237

Bruising: discover the colours of other creatures' blood, and how a medication overdose possibly inspired Vincent van Gogh's penchant for yellow. 239

Itch: where whale breaching is de-romanticised, and I reveal how astronauts wearing space helmets scratch their noses. 251

Allergies: how a Brazil nut allergy can ruin your sex life, plus why aristocrats tend to get hay fever more often than the plebs. 265

Acne: why pus prevented Karl Marx from sitting down, and why 'Whitehead' is a surname, but 'Blackhead' isn't. 276

Acknowledgements 286

Index 287