Category: Medical curiosities
2 articles in this category.
- Alopecia areata — An autoimmune condition in which the body's own immune system attacks hair follicles, producing sudden, smooth, coin-shaped bald patches. The hair often grows back — sometimes white first — and after a century of few options, the first real drugs arrived in 2022.
- Rapunzel syndrome — A rare and genuinely alarming medical condition in which a person who eats their own hair grows a hairball in the stomach with a long tail trailing into the intestine — named, with grim wit, after the fairy-tale princess.