Many people don’t know where their heart is, much less their lungs

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Maybe Google should include a ‘your body’ category on its search page. Researchers in London asked 722 people to identify the location of specific organs -- and even showed them body outlines with shaded areas from which to choose. The intestines were apparently fairly obvious. Almost 86% of participants could find that location.

But only 46.5% could properly locate the heart. The heart.

And the lungs? Forget it.

The researchers seemed somewhat taken aback by these results. Similar research had been done almost 40 years ago -- with pretty much the same results. But they apparently thought we’ve been using the wealth of online information at our fingertips to do more than satisfy idle curiosity about pop culture or feed our need for conspiracy theories.

Here’s the news release on the research.

Here’s the study, which was published today in BMC Family Practice.

And here are some handy diagrams of the body, courtesy of innerbody.com, plus a quick overview from the BBC. If you really want to go in-depth, there’s Gray’s Anatomy.

The study concludes: ‘Healthcare professionals still need to take care in providing organ specific information to patients and should not assume that patients have this information, even for those organs in which their medical problem is located.’

-- Tami Dennis