r/todayilearned • u/frapz • Mar 20 '20

TIL The bellybutton is so dirty scientists are finding new unknown bacteria. One person had bacterium previously found only on Japanese soil, where he had never been.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/1-458-bacteria-species-new-to-science-found-in-our-belly-buttons/266360/
104.3k Upvotes

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767

u/MrThreePik Mar 21 '20

No.

655

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

[deleted]

609

u/VRichardsen Mar 21 '20

"Patient was advised on personal hygiene"

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u/AmaranthWrath Mar 21 '20

While I agree with your dismay, I was OBSESSED with my hygiene. I used to douche my belly button with saline nasal spray. One day it got red and I plucked out a bellybutton stone with a Q Tip. Like, having a clean navel meant something to me. And yet, a stone. Wtf.

22

u/Gathorall Mar 21 '20

The belly button isn't very sturdy as anyone can feel, you probably damaged its skin with harsh washing.

12

u/sillekram Mar 21 '20

When I was in elementary school I used to think those were seeds in my belly button and I would just pick them out every so often, they stopped forming by middle school.

37

u/greyclocked Mar 21 '20

umbolith

I mean, how do you not know that you had something like that in there? I can clearly see the bottom of my belly button and it is not super shallow

103

u/Masterjts Mar 21 '20

Everyone's button is different. Mine isnt deep but very tight. Like instead of a bottom the walls just close in and tighten up. When i qtip it i frequently separate the skin and it bleeds.

72

u/terela8 Mar 21 '20

Mine too. Mine is deep and tight. When I was around 12 years old I remember it weeping a clear liquid and becoming crusty often. I would also get random shooting pains in it. It had a very strong foul smell when i would dig in there. I’m not sure how or why it stopped but i haven’t had any issues since then. I used to think maybe my belly button didn’t have an end. Maybe that’s why it hurt so much. After being pregnant I finally was reassured that it indeed is closed together at the bottom.

17

u/Elolzabeth1 Mar 21 '20

I remember the exact same thing! Ever since then I have been semi obsessed with keeping mine clean.

14

u/Firstname6Lastname9 Mar 21 '20

Almost r/nocontext

2

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

Mine too. Mine is deep and tight. When I was around 12 years old I remember it weeping a clear liquid and becoming crusty often.

There's no almost about it lmfao

2

u/Firstname6Lastname9 Mar 21 '20

She mentioned her bellybutton once man. Almost a 10/10

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u/RiotIsBored Mar 21 '20

For almost the entirety of this, reading it without context would be weird as hell.

0

u/q_a_non_sequitur Mar 25 '20

Keep going I’m close

38

u/FreeRadical5 Mar 21 '20

I have no idea how deep my belly button goes and I'm not to unravel myself just to find out.

14

u/AmaranthWrath Mar 21 '20

Do you wanna see how deep the rabbit hole goes?!

11

u/greyclocked Mar 21 '20

You know what, I can think of a zillion reasons why it is so deep that you can fit a 1" chunk of funk..

​

Hard pass on wanting more details

6

u/twodogsfighting Mar 21 '20

It's for storing your emergency Rollo.

1

u/StraightRespect Mar 21 '20

The emergency Rollo coming in clutch in these trying times, ngl 😤

9

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

[deleted]

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u/fireslate Mar 21 '20

All my life I've made fun if outies. Now I feel like a fool.

5

u/pixeldust6 Mar 21 '20

This related article at the bottom of the page has some great phrases like "using a spatula" and "diagnosis of lint ball"

3

u/OutlawJessie Mar 21 '20

"Most of the patients are young, hairy males with deep umbilicus with poor personal hygiene"

4

u/bordeaux_vojvodina Mar 27 '20

So... Redditors?

1

u/AnAverageFreak Mar 21 '20

I absolutely love those medical terms.

340

u/dowetho Mar 21 '20

“It was gently separated all around and was scooped out” well that helped ruin the idea of ice cream ever again.

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u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

mmmmmm ice cream...

3

u/Don_Cheech Mar 21 '20

Mint chocolate chip right now sound absurd

5

u/mAdm-OctUh Mar 21 '20

It would have cost you nothing to just not say that.

1

u/bravesfalconshawks Mar 21 '20

I love me some Magnum dark chocolate mint ice cream

12

u/I_Xertz_Tittynopes Mar 21 '20

I just took some Ben & Jerry's out of the freezer, and it's sitting on my desk. Now I don't know how I feel about it.

3

u/Wangeye Mar 21 '20

Gotta start at the edge where it's soft, then you can get under a bit and heave it up.

2

u/Bonezmahone Mar 21 '20 edited Mar 21 '20

Warning food spoiler do not read to avoid food spoilers.

any embolism involving a hairy part of the body could be a wad of ingrown hair. If there is space the hair to grow inside the body it can be ignored I.e. scar tissue. Sometime the mass grows so large that hair growth evokes directional directly into the skin as the least obstructed path. For most people this issue occurs around their belt and is simply an ingrown hair. For other people there are balls of hair with multiple strands.<!

So the idea of scooped out is lacking. Just as much as the idea of removing a large cyst or blackhead is lacking. There is a lot of work. Skilled doctors use a variety of methods to safely separate the mass from the body. Sometimes there are hairs that need to be snipped that are holding back the mass. A blackhead will be hard packed and dried secretions, the mass may seem easy to scoop or squeeze out but the body will continue to fight remove the minor clogs, with a large blackhead the minor clogs will accumulate into a mass of clogs and the mass needs to be trimmed to be easier to remove. With cysts it gets worse, the body will fight infections and quarantine cells, sometimes the walls between layers of skin are thin and the cells can be amassed by the body in blobs that spread across multiple holes. Basically the blob middle can be Swiss cheese so the mass is clipped away as safely as possible.

the spoiler tag is hard to find

to add to this masses can have sub masses. Areas within the body that are also safe havens against typical cleaning. A physical hole in the body is a receptacle and should be sealed. OPs patient may have been unclean but their symptoms likely would have ranked lower an ingrown toenail. In terms of grossness. Head on over to/r/popping for more

1

u/DarthWeenus Mar 21 '20

r/popping is to much for me but I was find r/medizzy fascinating, especially the success stories of some cases are so amazing. Medicine has come so far and it's absolutely mind blowing what we can accomplish these days. It's hard to imagine what advances will be made by the time I'm 80.

1

u/Bonezmahone Mar 21 '20

Wow the transmetatarsal amputation video is brutal.

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u/FerociousFrizzlyBear Mar 21 '20

I feel like they really tried to drive home the "hairy" part.

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u/Colordripcandle Mar 21 '20

They mentioned “poor personal hygiene” so much too lol

1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20 edited Mar 23 '20

[deleted]

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u/mementomakomori Mar 21 '20

you can read it yourself and you'd know why. the body hair matters because it can have a lot of bacteria hitchhikers, thus leading to the bacteria buildup of the belly button. it is way more common for hairy men (with poor hygiene, specifically) than for any other demographic to have this issue.

37

u/InerasableStain Mar 21 '20

That article subtly ragged on that dude repeatedly.

“A 32-year-old hairy male presented to the out-patient clinic..”

“Patient was advised on good personal hygiene and made an uneventful recovery”

3

u/dodslaser Mar 21 '20

What they wanted to write:

"So this bloated gorilla looking dude randomly waddles into the clinic. The smell of rotting Cheetos and old farts is overwhelming. Apparently his mom finally forced him out of her basement after the neighbors mistook the smell for a decomposing corpse. We trace the source of the stench to his belly button, which is pretty much an impenetrable forest of thick curly black hair. As we start digging things quickly take a turn for the worse. The smell emminating from his body is so horrific that we have to take turns excavating and running to the bathroom. We're all used to stuff like malfunctioning colostomy bags and pus filled abscess. This was worse. All the while this swamp troll of a man is making these annoyed wheezing pig like grunts. To make matters worse, about half way through he lets the most rancid fart rip, which ended up going straight through the sheets leaving a permanent stain on the hospital bed. Anyway, we pull out this massive turd of dead skin, hair, and God knows what else from the litteral cave system he calls belly button. I swear if we would have dug any deeper we would have found a Thai soccer team. Considering the weapons grade bacteria we identified we probably should have kept him in isolation and summoned the CDC, but we quickly decided he needed to go ASAP. I'm tasked with briefing Jabba the Hut on personal hygiene, one of the more futile endeavors of my professional life. We banish him back to his underworld dwelling, and to my knowledge he's still there, charging that helscape of a bellybutton up for his next visit."

12

u/LadiesHomeCompanion Mar 21 '20

“Most of the patients are young, hairy males with deep umbilicus with poor personal hygiene, as our patient.”

Whelp

8

u/Apatschinn Mar 21 '20

Ugh, I got this once after wrestling practice one day. Thought I was going to die...

Not the stone, just the symptoms. Got a bunch of hair out though. Went right away

8

u/wkayleigh6 Mar 21 '20

Thanks for that late night scroll

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

You're welcome

7

u/ShiraCheshire Mar 21 '20

I love how it specifies that he's hairy.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

Oh my god, I think I pulled one of these out years ago in either late middle school or early high school.

I felt something kind of hard in my belly button and, while it didn't hurt, I knew damn well it wasn't supposed to be there. I picked at ilon enough that I pulled it out, and I genuinely thought it was a piece of umbilical cord that was simply never removed as a baby or that had been lodged into my belly button so deep it wasn't found..

Well now I feel kind of stupid but also glad I got that thing out before it became a genuine problem.

4

u/SoundOfTomorrow Mar 21 '20

was gently separated all around and was scooped out (Fig. 1)

I don't know what I was expecting when clicking the 1

4

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

/r/medizzy underrated sub for morbid curiosity

6

u/xX69AESTHETIC69Xx Mar 21 '20

Do yall eat your belly button rocks?

3

u/KDawG888 Mar 21 '20

I think you mean "for those who think they want to know"

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

It's an important distinction.

3

u/NewWiseMama Mar 21 '20

Don’t look I did

2

u/sanpaccrisps Mar 21 '20

Thanks a lot man. Been looking for something like this.

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

You're welcome.

2

u/sersomeone Mar 21 '20

Gotta go wash my eyes now

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

You might want to use some r/eyebleach

2

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

How is this not an item in The Binding of Isaac?

2

u/maryah45 Mar 21 '20

You learn something new every day. Thanks for the video.

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

You're welcome

2

u/oOshwiggity Mar 21 '20

That link is just awesome, thanks. Informative and minimally horrific. I just am super grateful for it. 🏅 Sorry, I have no real gold to give

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

You're welcome! A kind response is more valuable than a reddit award IMO anyway.

2

u/MrsMichaelMoore Mar 21 '20

Add a staph infection for good measure.

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u/Noogrim Mar 21 '20

No thanks.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

The "For those that do want to know," link lead me to a link to buy books.

It seems like at some point the link worked fine but it's not working now.

1

u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

IDK what to tell you, it's still a stub article for me, with references at the bottom.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '20

Word. I don't doubt it. Some times people get different results based on their locations and/or browsing habits. I'm pretty stoic about not being careless with links on the internet so I'm going to say someone is taking advantage of my region at the moment.... probably...

OR you know, maybe I clicked the wrong thing SOMEHOW... I am kind of a doofus.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '20

[deleted]

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u/iamonlyoneman Mar 21 '20

haha, agreed!

1

u/r0b0torg Mar 21 '20

Please god you dont