Reddit and What I Found There

In this post, I am going to write about what kind of forums I found on Reddit that were related to my major.

Appelo, Jurgen. "Reddit icon" August 2012. Flickr.

Some of the forums I found that were related to physiology seemed almost like an online clinic in a sense. There were posts asking why something happens to the human body and what can affect certain changes within the body.

For example, one person asked why some people tolerate the cold better than others. There were several comments with claims and evidence supporting those claims. Other posts were related to finding good resources, like textbooks and websites, for learning about physiology and anatomy.

One interesting forum that I came across provided a link to an article “Blood vessels can actually get better with age.” This article claims that arteries are able to adapt to oxidative stress caused by aging. This is debatable to many people because it is widely known that oxidative stress is the main cause of age-related diseases.

However, studies claim that aging triggers some sort of counteraction of effects of oxidative stress on blood vessels; but I won’t bore you with all of this anatomy talk! There were comments on this forum questioning these findings. Additionally, another blog post that led me to an article, “Why do some people feel the cold more than others?” was intriguing to me because it is directly related to my major (physiology) and elaborates on different experiments that were conducted to support the supposed answer to the article question.

Overall, the impression I got from the Reddit forums was not entirely what I had hoped for. People were not necessarily debating; they were providing information to forums posting with specific questions. It is not my favorite website for research, but it definitely isn’t useless.