"The groundwork of all happiness is health." - Leigh Hunt

Answers to 7 navel-gazing questions on the belly button

1. Why do I also have a belly button?

Your belly button, or navel – Medically speaking, your placenta – is the everlasting scar where your placenta connected your circulatory system, if you were a fetus, to the placenta. Fetuses don't breathe, eat or eliminate waste, so the placenta provides an exchange site for the mother to move oxygen and nutrients from her blood to the fetus, in addition to waste from her body. Accumulates to exclude.

Once the umbilical cord is cut, the stump dries up and falls off, exposing the child's navel.
Wachara Fong/iStock via Getty Images Plus

After the child is born, the physician or other attendant cuts the cord and closes the stub, which then dries up and falls off after about per week, leaving your belly button.

If the cord isn't cut, as has been the custom in some times and places and is becoming the trend again in others, it would close after an hour or so, then a number of days after birth. The latter will separate naturally. Some are healthcare practitioners. Concerned about this “birth of the lotus”. There could also be a risk of infection, because the placenta stays attached to the placenta, which is dead tissue once it leaves the mother's body.

2. If it's a scar, why doesn't it go away with time?

If you simply injure the outer layers of your skin, equivalent to a cut or burn, the scars will soon disappear completely, especially in young people. And newborns are very young. But unlike those conditions, the umbilicus involves more layers of tissue — not only the skin however the connective tissue underneath — so it is smart that it doesn't mix in with the remainder of your abdominal wall after it heals.

How about some pretty complex surgeries that don't leave scars? Doctors perform many operations in ways in which deliberately avoid scarring, which isn't nature's way. In fact, one approach to reduce scarring for surgeries is to make use of this existing scar – surgeons can benefit from the navel as an incision site. Removing your appendix or Gallbladder or for Weight loss surgery.

But in the event you don't like the best way your placenta scar looks, cosmetic surgery to alter its shape, called umbilicoplasty, is feasible. People sometimes use this cosmetic option after pregnancy or after having a piercing removed, or simply to make an “outie” look “innie.”

Smooth belly with a belly button on the outside
Outies are much less common than inies.
Zev Barkan/Flickr, CC BY

3. But why do some people still have ots?

The shape of your belly button isn't related to the situation of the clamp or where your doctor cut the bone.

Outies are only one example Common human variationAs some people have curly hair or dimples. When the tip of the remnant of the placenta protrudes through the skin around it, you've a prolapse. About 10% of people have it.. Any concave navel is known as an “inny” and a convex one is known as an “outy.”

Sometimes Oatz may be attributable to an umbilical hernia or one other medical problem in the child, but more often than not it's simply because your genes encode it. You can also have temporary prolapse late in pregnancy, when abdominal pressure from the growing fetus can stretch your navel and push it out.

4. How deep does it go?

You can probably easily check the depth of your navel – there aren't any hidden places. What lies beneath it's what lies beneath the skin of the remainder of your abdomen: your abdominal muscles, to which the navel is connected by a small umbilical cord, and the peritoneum, the membrane that lines the abdominal cavity. Lines up. Below which can be your guts — that's, your intestines and other abdominal organs. If you proceed this imaginary journey back, you'll reach your spine – where the belly button will likely be lined up. Between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae (L3 and L4).

Learn tips on how to find your pet's belly button.

5. Do other animals have belly buttons?

Since the umbilicus is the scar where the placenta connects the fetus to the placenta, all placentas are present in mammals. This includes all but mammals. marsupials (equivalent to kangaroos and possums) and monotremes (equivalent to platypuses and echidnas).

Your cat or dog or guinea pig has a belly button, but because it's a flatter spot than an individual's, relatively than concave, and covered with fur, you will have missed it.

6. Is there anything besides lint?

As with any concave surface, if you've an Annie, it would probably occasionally collect pieces of debris. Your navel has the identical microbiota as the remainder of your skin. Because it is kind of protected from soap and rubbing. Stable and diverse bacterial community Your navel lives greater than anywhere else on the surface of your skin.

Innovative. Belly Button Biodiversity Project North Carolina State University has revealed rather a lot about these little dudes. The researchers found More than 2,000 species of bacteria In the primary 60 belly buttons they investigated.

Most people appear to have a set of eight common belly button bacteria, however the project is discovering recent ones on a regular basis.

7. Why do some people's belly buttons stick out?

There really hasn't been much research on why some people find belly buttons disgusting.

There could also be overlap with this. omphalophobiaFear of belly buttons and touching them. Other than therapy or anti-anxiety medication, there isn't a specific treatment that a physician can prescribe for some other phobia.

Whatever your feelings about belly buttons, they're harmless. Moreover, they're a part of your evolutionary legacy as a mammal, animal groups so invested of their offspring that they take nutrients and oxygen, the mother's bread and breath, on to their developing young. invented a approach to deliver Your navel could also be a reminder of the primary life-sustaining care you received from one other person before you were born.