Signal or just daily noise?
11 sets of body health clues we can find in the mirror (and elsewhere).
One problem with being a ‘recovering nurse’ is that headlines most normal people would quickly bypass catch your eye. Today it was this one: Your poop schedule says a lot about your overall health, study suggests.1 And that got me thinking about what we see every day without actually seeing it: when there’s a body signal we’re overlooking that we maybe shouldn’t be.
Heads up: If you’re someone who scans constantly for alarms from your body, keep in mind this post is pretty broad info. You need a real clinician to determine whether there’s something to actually worry about. OTOH, it also makes sense to use common body sense rather than depending solely on sorting through reams of blood work once a year for something that your body might have been signaling you about earlier.
Here are ten more body clue sets (and some bonus info) about our health.
6 things your hair says…
Changes in hair and nails as we age.
What earwax can reveal...
What your eyes say...
What your teeth and breath can show…
What your snot can reveal...
Skin: 11 surprising diseases that dermatologists find first.
What bodily secretions like blood, wax and tears can say…
What your hands can tell you…
What your feet can tell you…
9 foot pressure points and corresponding benefits (reflexology3)
Most of the articles in this post report on multiple studies with direct links through to the original research. When a general media article is about just one study, we check the original study to make sure it actually says what the media article reports. More and more general media articles are being written by non-specialty reporters, and live-person medical editing is something many media outlets increasingly can’t or won’t pay for. This article is a good example of why we check the original story when it focuses on one study. In the media article, this sentence appears: “These participants self-reported how often they dropped the kids off at the pool...” I have NO idea how the ‘pool’ got in there. One suspects AI rearranging something about poop or stool. But I can tell you for sure there’s nothing in the original research report about anyone dropping kids off at the pool. Otherwise, the article is accurate.
Here’s the original research report. I love this one! In Western culture, we’re trained in Western medicine, a tradition rooted 2000+ years ago to Hippocrates in Greece. Among other traditions, he gave started the theory that hysteria—a not-manly thing, so of course a disease—is caused by the woman’s hys (uterus) wandering around in her body, particularly when she was deprived of the “benefits” of sex and procreation. (Possibly a male perspective on bennies, you say?) That belief persisted well into the 20th century. (Some might say it’s alive and well in politics today.) Keep that long-held Western medicine doctrine in mind as you consider that Eastern medicine, or Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)—which also has at least a 2000+ year tradition—has historically been dismissed by Western medicine-trained doctors, nurses and other health professionals. A tongue evaluation is one of the basic diagnostic tenets of TCM, but try getting your Western medicine-trained provider to talk to about that. I’m iconoclastic on medical belief systems; no one knows everything. So…using AI to document what TCM providers have known and done for millennia makes me smile.
Reflexology—which is now bodywork mainstream—is also TCM. A primary difference between Eastern (TCM) and Western medicine is that in Western medicine we focus on individual organs (liver) or systems (digestive). TCM treats the body as an interconnected system, and reflexology is a great example of that approach. Here are two definitions of reflexology, one from a TCM provider and one from Healthline, the latter with a Western medicine-oriented perspective.