There was such a mystery when, during hard physical work, part of the water disappeared from the blood for a while. And without a trace.
People are accustomed to the fact that in our body, the lost water must leave with sweat or through the kidneys, or with breathing, or in the worst case, accumulate in the form of edema. This can be understood and even forgiven. But some cases of water loss were unexplained. The water did not evaporate, did not flow out, did not accumulate in the form of edema, but hid somewhere.
In the middle of the last century, medical science was already able to unravel such mysterious stories, and (what is most interesting) rather wild manners and laws of the middle of the last century helped it in this matter.
In the story of the missing water, everything became clear only thanks to the electric shock.
Electroshock
This is a brutal procedure from psychiatry and neurology. Now this is rarely done, and in the fifties of the last century, people were shocked to the right and left.
Have you seen these scenes from old films? There, orderlies in white coats tied on their backs put a psycho in a straitjacket on the couch, and a doctor in pince-nez and a tie twisted the current on the apparatus.
Such sufferers in straitjackets with the help of electricity set off a powerful seizure, during which the brain was restarted, and the muscles were terribly overstrained. It was the hardest physical work of all physical work.
The patients' brains rebooted like a computer that was temporarily turned off. Sometimes it really helped to correct the brain to some extent.
It is clear that this procedure is dangerous, and the medical staff was interested in the client's order. Therefore, patients often took blood for analysis.
The test results indicated that some of the water was missing from the blood. The concentration of sodium and chloride in the blood increased, and it is not yet clear where the potassium came from.
After careful reflection, the then scientists decided that the water goes into the cells. It was assumed that during hard physical work inside cells, large organic molecules break up into small ones and pull water on themselves.
We have potassium hidden inside our cells and there it is combined with a bunch of different organic molecules. And when these molecules fell apart, the potassium dropped out of the cells into the blood.
We have already agreed that water in our body passes unhindered by itself inside the cells and back. It is held only by the osmotic pressure of solutions of salts or organic matter. Where there is more salt, water will flow there.
And now, if inside the cells large organic molecules fall apart into several small ones, then they draw water on themselves more strongly, and it joyfully rushes out of the blood into the cells. Sometimes this causes a noticeable jump in the level of sodium in the blood.
The wild times of the middle of the last century have passed, and now sports are called heavy physical exertion, and ordinary glycogen has been declared large organic molecules inside cells.
Glycogen is something like our human starch. Like a potato or bun. In it, glucose is packaged in long chains and bundles. During physical exertion, these long molecules break up into many small ones and pull water on themselves.
A few minutes after the end of the physical activity, everything settles down, and the water returns back to the blood.
It turns out that today's modest explanation of this phenomenon was substantiated somewhere in 1950 by rather brutal methods.
Have you had any brutal medical procedure?
