Posts in “ Believe It or Not ”

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Thursday, 23 July 2009 17:23

People who will sing but not speak.

There are some cases when a person who is not able to speak will still be able to sing as the result of a specific aphasia.

Aphasia is an impairment or loss of the faculty of understanding or using spoken or written language, even though there is integrity of the neuromuscular structures that produce language.  Aphasia is caused by brain damage, and is produced by left brain hemisphere damage in right-handed people.

Almost 90% of the population is right handed and of this percentage, more than 99% have a strong left hemisphere dominance for the linguistic functions. This is the reason why in right handed people, only left hemisphere brain damage will cause aphasia. Left-handed people will have a different hemispheric brain pattern, so their linguistic functions will be represented in both brain hemispheres. As a result, damage in any hemisphere will produce aphasia which will be less severe than those with the same damage in right-handed people.

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Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Saturday, 7 February 2009 13:21

There are several skin diseases that are exacerbated and/or precipitated with sunlight – lupus, rosacea, pellagra, and porphyria among others- from which a specific subtype of porphyria is the basis of the Werewolf Legend. I’m talking here about Congenital Erythropoietic Porphyria or Günther’s disease, a very rare (less than 100-200 cases) and severe form of porphyria where there is a lack of a specific enzyme in the bone marrow, urogen III synthase also known as cosynthetase. Children with this condition typically are hairy, they have red urines, and they have extreme sensitivity to sunlight which leaves multiple scars and mutilations. Treatment is based in protection from the sun and splenectomy. Another form of porphyria, Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, is also characterized by sensitivity to the sun with subsequent overgrowth of hair in the face plus other skin erosions like blisters and others.

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Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Sunday, 6 April 2008 17:12

Folk and fairy tales tells of deadly visions that visit us in our sleep. The example that comes into mind is a healthy man who goes to bed and is heard to cry out during his sleep, the next morning he is dead. The same example is seen repeatedly elsewhere. Can you imagine what it is to die in one’s sleep? No wonder folklore, mythology and the like took the matter quite descriptively. We find more background via a most curious article in the Fortean Times :

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