Health Conditions You Should Dread

Have you ever sneered at the advice to always thank God in every situation, just because some of your heart desires have not been granted by him?

If your answer is in the affirmative, know that, no matter how bad your situation is, there are people who wish to trade places with you.

Do you not believe this and still do not see reasons to thank God?   You should visit a hospital to see how lucky you really are. You will be amazed at the weird and serious diseases and conditions that people live with.

To reverberate the realisation of how blessed you really are, in your consciousness, here are some of the strangest health conditions and diseases people live with.

Body Integrity Identity Disorder, BIID

Sufferers of this condition are totally rational, but they feel as if one of their body parts should not be there.  Those parts seem horrific and alien to them.

Sufferers are usually are explicit about the parts they do not want, especially their limbs.  Some even go as far as drawing lines in the exact spot they desperately want cut off and how.

Neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran, recently discovered the cause of the condition: sufferers feel like this because they are missing part of their body image map in their brains.

According to him, their unwanted limb is not correctly mapped onto the corresponding brain region, leaving them feeling extremely uncomfortable with it.

Congenital insensitivity to pain

Have you ever wished you do not feel pain?  There is a condition known as congenital insensitivity to pain whereby sufferers, born with this rare genetic mutation, are unable to feel pain.

Experts say they die early as a result of their inabilities to notice treatable injuries.  So, do you still wish you do not feel pain?

Pica

Sufferers of this condition have this huge urge to eat non-food items and experts say it is often as a result of stress, mineral deficiency or pregnancy.  There is no ‘no – go area’ with this.

From metal nails, chairs, tables, salt shaker tops, chalk, faeces to glass, strange items have been removed from the stomach of sufferers. The disease has different categories.  Some are weirder and more dangerous than others.

Morgellon’s disease

Sufferers of this disease, feel as if there are things crawling, biting and stinging them below the surface of their skin.  They have this constant urge to scratch themselves, resulting in insomnia and skin lesions

In 2012, researchers at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention issued the results of an investigation of the condition; they found that patients did not have disease organisms under their skin.

This finding suggested that the sensations were manifestations of “delusional infestation”- a false feeling of being infected by parasites.

Cotard delusion

This delusion, otherwise known as walking corpse syndrome, is a condition whereby people wake with the believe they have died, that they no longer exist, or that their flesh is rotting off.

Experts say they feel like this because the brain region involved in facial recognition has been disconnected from the regions involved in emotion.

They say that sufferers recognise themselves when they look in the mirror but do not have the usual emotional response.  This is because their appearance has lost its association with their sense of self.

Alien hand syndrome

People with the condition usually have hands that reach, grab and hold onto things without the intention of the patient.

A case reported in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry told the tale of an 81-year-old woman right-handed woman whose left hand was uncontrollable. It choked her and hit her face and shoulder involuntarily.

A 2009 article in the Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases found that a stroke in the brain’s right parietal lobe was the cause of this.

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome

People with this condition have the ability to bend their limbs in seemingly impossible directions. Many of them also have super-stretchy skin and some of them have turned this condition to a show- business.

They have many people come to pay to watch them as they stretch themselves to unimaginable lengths.  As ‘lucrative’ as this condition may seem, it is not all rosy.  Experts say they bruise easily and their wounds heal slowly.

Persistent sexual arousal syndrome

People with this condition have constant orgasms that bring more embarrassment and distress, than being pleasurable sensations .

That is because this condition, which occurs mostly in women, causes hypersensitivity to orgasm with the slightest application of pressure.

An article published by the Boston University School of Medicine says that this, most times, happens without any trigger at all, not even sexual desire.  It is said to be first diagnosed in 2001.

Now that you have seen some of the conditions suffered by people, do you still argue the need to bless your supreme maker that you do not have any?

Posted by by LINDA IRABOR on February 17, 2013. Filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.