Doctors Reveal Which Mysteries About The Human Body Still Haven't Been Fully Explained

The human body is a strange and amazing thing.

In one moment, it can be delicate and fragile.

Bones can shatter from a simple fall on the sidewalk.

Or people can be hit by a car and just bounce backward and pop right back up.

It's extraordinary.

Sometimes you feel like death, and then the next minute, you can be a superhero.

The body has so many secrets.

It's time for those in the know to spill the body's tea.

Redditor Familiar-Big-4348 wanted to hear about some of the body's greatest unanswered questions, so they asked:

"Doctors of Reddit, what’s a mystery about the human body that science still hasn’t fully explained?"

Fragility

"How the brain deals with damage. We can’t give recovery times or predict outcomes as we just don’t know. The brain is remarkably resilient and fragile all at the same time."

- Ultimatelee

Human Body Illustration GIF by PES Giphy

Screaming

"Colic. The bane of my pediatric specialty. Oh, your kid screams uncontrollably for hours on end? Welp, just don’t shake your baby. Good luck!"

"ETA: If there was a medical reason for your kid screaming, then it’s not colic. Colic is defined by there not being a cause for the screaming. If your child had reflux, CMPA, etc, that was their diagnosis. Not colic. Also, it’s usually at the same time every day, with non-stop screaming for 3 hours. A medical cause like reflux or CMPA would not happen only at certain times of the day."

- efox02

It Works

"I was in hospital once and about to be put under sedation - I casually asked how Anesthesia works, to which the anesthetist replied, 'We don't actually know.'"

"When I got home, I did some research - we don't know how anesthesia actually works, we just know that it does."

- Captain_Coco_Koala

"I’m an anesthesiologist. I just left this comment."

"We know how patients react to it, and we know how to dose and monitor it, and we know all the possible side effects. But the precise mechanism of our volatile anesthetics is still not completely clear."

- casapantalones

FATIGUE

"Autoimmune anything. I used to think it was pretty straightforward, but then I was diagnosed with a disorder. Everything is so hit and miss and open to interpretation, even bloodwork. I went from seropositive to seronegative at one point, how??? Do antibodies, rheumatoid factor, and ana just disappear? Or fluctuate? "

"Depends on the rheumatologist you ask. Symptoms all overlap for so many similar things, and the treatments all work differently for different people, until sometimes they randomly don't or do for a while, then quit. Maybe you have Lupus, maybe you have Arthritis? Can't be sure, so take this malaria drug about it and let me know if you get mouth sores, your liver swells up, or it does nothing for no reason. Could be the meds, could be a flair."

"Either way, it's going to affect parts of your body you never knew interacted. How is your relationship with gluten and dairy, because it's about to get weird. Which came first, the depression or the inflammation? No idea, but here's another four pills about it. You're hypermobile ever heard of Ehlers-Danlos or POTS? Similar but different, but who knows... why did you come in again? Fatigue 😩."

- Routine_Order_7813

Double Blind

"How placebo meds have actually made a big difference in disease treatment."

- Aquaphile_Sundog

"Pharmaceutical companies can spend billions on a drug only to have double blind studies stop it in its tracks."

- AGooDone

"Not so fun fact, it’s even possible for a pharma company to stop development because a drug was too effective in testing. I work at a third-party testing lab for pharmaceuticals, and my manager told me about a project he was working on for a company that was trying to bring a generic version to market of a brand-name drug that had recently gone off patent."

"The project was shut down suddenly when it was found that their generic was outperforming the brand name in human trials, and since generics are supposed to be equivalent, the FDA wanted them to refile as a new drug instead."

"But new drugs are way costlier to develop and test than generics, and they figured there wouldn’t be enough of a market for them to make a profit, so since they couldn’t file as a generic and couldn’t afford to file as a new drug, they just had to shut the whole thing down instead. Isn’t bureaucracy fun!"

- Fakjbf

Stop the Pain

"Not a doctor, but recently went through cancer treatment. One of the medications I was on is designed to stimulate white blood cell production, but a nasty side effect is that it can cause your bones to hurt. Antihistamines work REALLY well to stop the pain, and no one knows why."

- NeedingVsGetting

skull GIF Giphy

Random Stuff

"The immune system is just its own insane thing. My son is recovering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, and what I have learnt is that the immune system just does random stuff sometimes, and we don't know why, and have to hope it calms down before it destroys something important. So unsettling, honestly."

- hampie42

No Smoking Gun

"How do we lose accommodation ( our ability to read small print). We have a lot of theories, but no concrete explanation as to why. The lens continues to grow throughout our life, but it becomes more biconvex, which should add plus power to the eye, but it doesn't. The ciliary muscle remains functional well into the 90th decade."

"The lens zonules remain attached and functional throughout life. We think it's a change of all the above. But, no smoking gun. This is why you can ask 10 different eye doctors why we lose our ability to read small print, and each has a different reason why."

- brik70p

A Can of Worms

"ALS. It's a horrible disease with no cure, no real treatment, no known cause, and a 100% death rate. Diagnosis is often only through a lengthy process of elimination. Typical life expectancy after diagnosis is 2-5 years. It causes slow, progressive degeneration and loss of muscle function, leading to paralysis. Probably something autoimmune related, which is its own can of worms."

"It has at least 3 common names for the same thing..."

'Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)."

"Lou Gherig's Disease."

"Motor Neuron Disease (MND)."

- Jijster

Gotta go right now!

"The microbiota, dysfunctions in which likely explain at least a few functional disorders that we don’t understand, e.g., IBS."

"People with IBS have symptoms but otherwise will have completely normal gastrointestinal investigations, ie, there is no structural problem that can be conventionally identified."

"Increasingly, it’s thought that IBS may be a disease of disordered microbiota, which in itself isn’t well understood. The microbiota even more mysteriously seems to have some connection to the brain and mind itself, which may be why IBS is often comorbid with psychiatric problems like anxiety and depression."

- Prokopton1

Good Night

"Exactly why we need sleep and how it works. We have a general sense, but can’t explain it beyond the brain's needs."

- Quiet-Competition849

"We recently found that the brain cleans itself whilst we sleep, getting rid of toxins that build up during the day. Sleep is also key for forming and sorting memories."

- berrycrunch92

Donald Duck Sleeping GIF Giphy

Explain please...

"Most of it isn’t fully explained. Most of it is partially explained. A lot of engineering-types of people come into the hospital expecting the body to be explained- if there’s a problem you simply need to find the bug and fix it let me see the data I can do it myself - and then they get wildly disappointed when symptoms and lab values and imaging don’t correlate one to one, that medications have side effects that sometimes are worse than the problem they are meant to solve, and that replacement of one organ doesn’t fix the rest of the organs that are failing, even if the damage was all related to the first organ."

"The idea that humans and their body parts have a life span is both innately understood and yet impossible for many people to comprehend. Anyway, there’s more that we don’t know than that we know about how it all works. That’s why science funding and high-quality research are important to fund."

- Own-Cauliflower2386

A wild time...

"Most things related to pregnancy. Also, pathologies like eclampsia are not well understood. Babies are also pretty wild."

- wurst_cheese_case

"My wife and I have been dealing with various fertility doctors for years now. It's unbelievable how poorly it's understood. 'We don't really know why you can't get pregnant. None of our tests, blood work, ultrasounds, number tracking, etc., are finding any real problems. But we know x helps some people. Why don't you try taking this supplement/drug/shot and check back next month? That'll be $300.' It's maddening!"

- sokttocs

God Bless You

"The mechanism of the photic sneeze reflex - why some people sneeze when they go out in bright light."

- Skillthiz

"Both my twin brother and I have this reflex. It was always amusing to our friends when we'd leave a building into the bright sun, and my brother and I would sneeze within 1 second of each other."

"I'd heard it's something to do with the nerve that carries the sneeze signal being closer to the optic nerve than normal, and the bright light causing stimulation of the sneeze nerve. This might be total s**t, of course, but I did read it like 20 years ago."

"Also, my son had a 50% chance of inheriting the condition from me, and has."

- WhatAGoodDoggy

There is no answer...

"Frozen shoulder! We know who it tends to affect (mainly middle-aged people, diabetics), but the why isn't fully understood."

- therobster18

Warming Up Dungeons And Dragons GIF by Encounter Party Giphy

Underresearched

"Endometriosis. It’s severely underresearched, with no real known cause for why the body will do that. Severely painful to live with and affects more than just 'bad periods.' Mine would trigger my sciatic nerve, I believe, and would cause major weakness in my legs to the point I began using a cane on a daily basis before I had a hysterectomy."

- lunarcthulhu

That is a lot of information to process.

We must look more into Endometriosis.

Too many women are affected for us all not to know more.

Thankfully, I don't know much about this frozen shoulder.

And frankly, I don't want to.

I've got enough going on.

The body is quite a piece of work.

Let's keep it moving as long as we can.