All parts of our bodies are interconnected in one way or another. This is why sometimes what affects one area of the body can just as easily spread to and affect a different area of it.
This is something that science and biology have told us for a very long time, but sometimes we still fail to realize that these connections are so strong.
It isn’t always easy for us to register that something that infects through the mouth can cause problems in the heart and show signs of the problem in the hands.
Shortly after a young man from Canada went to the dentist, he began experiencing a variety of strong symptoms.
He had a fever, was experiencing abdominal pain, has lost his appetite and was having trouble sleeping due to night sweats.
He had also developed a painful and large aneurysm on one of the palms of his hands.
Doctors ran some tests on him and diagnosed him with endocarditis, which is a kind of infection that occurs in, on and around the valves inside the heart and the heart chamber lining.
This diagnosis came as a surprise even to the doctors, as the man was only 27 years old and relatively healthy.
They were baffled as to how he’d contracted this infection, but as they ran tests and asked him questions about the past few weeks, the truth began to unfold.
While the man had been at the dentist for some routine dental work, bacteria from his mouth had managed to get into his bloodstream, thus making its way around the body.
Blood culture tests returned positive results for the Streptococcus salivarius bacteria, which is a kind most often found in the mouth.
The damage that it had done by traveling through his bloodstream to different parts of the body was shocking, but thankfully, treatable.
More tests showed that there was a mass on man’s aortic valve in his heart which was infected, and he also had dead tissue present on his left kidney and spleen.
The blood vessels in his hand had also been affected, which explains the aneurysm he had in that part of his body.
Imagine: just one trip to the dentist and one rush of bacteria into the bloodstream affected this man’s heart, kidneys, spleen, and blood vessels.
Their spread through all parts of his body had also caused a number of other minor complications.
Luckily, doctors were able to prescribe antibiotics to the man that would clear the infection from this bacteria away, all throughout his body, safely.
But these antibiotics could not repair the damage done to his heart’s valve, and being a valve that controls the blood flow into major arteries, it was vital to act fast.
He had to undergo a major surgical operation in order to fix this.
The man is fine and healthy now, thankfully, but it’s amazing and mildly terrifying to think of how interconnected all the parts of our body are and susceptible this makes us to all sorts of problems.
Take care of your body and treat it well, as you never know how it will be affected by the things you do!