Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A profound distortion in a person’s perception of reality, typically accompanied by a powerful sense of reality. An hallucination may be a sensory experience in which a person can see, hear, smell, taste, or feel something that is not there. The types of hallucinations include:

An unpleasant odor from the mouth, commonly referred to as bad breath. Halitosis can be caused by the consumption of certain foods, poor oral hygiene, alcohol or tobacco use, dry mouth, or by certain chronic medical conditions.

The downy hair on the body of the fetus and newborn baby. The lanugal hair (or lanugo) is the first hair to be produced by the fetal hair follicles. It is very fine, soft and usually is unpigmented. The lanugal hair is prenatal hair. It appears at about 5 months of gestation and begins to be shed…

An alcoholic chaser reputed to relieve a hangover, usually needed the morning after imbibing too much alcohol. There is no scientific evidence as to the efficacy of this time-honored treatment for a hangover. The saying originated in the belief that a cure for hydrophobia (rabies) or any disease contracted from a dog bite consisted of taking a hair of the dog that…

Hair loss is the thinning of hair on the scalp. The medical term for hair loss is alopecia. Alopecia can be temporary or permanent. The most common form of hair loss occurs gradually and is referred to as “androgenetic alopecia,” meaning that a combination of hormones (androgens are male hormones) and heredity (genetics) is needed to…

A sac from which a hair grows and into which the sebaceous (oil) glands open. The follicle is lined by cells derived from the epidermal (outside) layer of the skin. Each follicle normally goes through a five-year cycle of growth and rest, with about 90% of the follicles growing hair at any one time, averaging about six…

The physique or body build. Also the posture. For example, corticosteroid therapy can produce a characteristic cushingoid habitus with a moon face, “buffalo hump” at the back of the neck, and obesity of the trunk. From the Latin for “condition” from the Latin verb “habere” meaning “to hold.”

The miscarriage of 3 or more consecutive pregnancies. The abortion of 3 or more miscarriages (spontaneous abortions) with no intervening pregnancies is also termed recurrent abortion. Habitual or recurrent abortion is a form of infertility. It is sometimes due to chromosome abnormalities or other genetic causes.

Stands for highly active antiretroviral therapy. Treatment with a very potent drug “cocktail” to suppress the growth of HIV, the retrovirus responsible for AIDS.

Medical shorthand for history and physical, the initial clinical evaluation and examination of the patient.