Recently, there are two unfortunate news: one is that a 37-year-old editor-in-chief of a network media died suddenly due to cerebral hemorrhage; the other is that a 25-year-old employee of a famous accounting firm joined only six months ago due to busy work, suffering from a cold but did not take a good rest, coupled with their own negligence, and only when the fever continued to go to the hospital, and finally died of toxic meningitis. While people lamented for the lost lives, they also focused on “death by overwork”. Although there is no definite conclusion on whether these two young white-collar workers died due to overwork, the work pressure and health condition of urban people is really worrying. Fierce competition and intense work leave people with less and less time for their bodies and minds, and they often fail to pay enough attention to abnormal signals from their bodies or emotions. In fact, before a major disease occurs, the body will more or less send us some warning signals. If we can usually pay more attention to their bodies, regular medical checkups, and understand the meaning of some abnormal body signals, we can eliminate these health hazards to a certain extent in time. Our body is like a sophisticated machine, but when it goes wrong, we can’t open the back cover of the machine directly to know where the problem lies, as in the case of ordinary machines, the body is a black box, most of the time we are using the appearance of the box to speculate on what is happening inside the fault. The person who fixes the machine – the doctor – also uses these clues, together with some auxiliary techniques that can peek inside the machine (such as taking blood tests, taking X-rays, CT or MRI), to determine what is wrong with what part. Thus, in most cases, abnormal body signals become an important clue to determine disease. The combination of information gathered from this black box is how doctors get closer to the truth. The body gives us many different kinds of signals, which is why medical students spend the first few years of their medical careers clutching a thick copy of Symptomatology over and over again. Although the complexity of our body’s signals cannot be described in a few thousand words, it is better than nothing, so we will focus here on the warning signs that precede the onset of some of the more common but more dangerous diseases. The warning signs from the body can be pain, bleeding, or fever, so let’s talk about them in detail. Let’s start at the beginning: a headache is a very common thing that probably everyone has experienced at one time or another, and it is also the most common reason why people go to the doctor. A little headache with a cold is not uncommon in everyday life, and an occasional mild headache will not attract much attention and may not be a big deal, but if the pain continues to affect your life, you need to seek medical attention. Although headaches can be indicative of many diseases in the body, there is no need to worry too much because 90% of headaches are a sign of benign diseases such as migraine, tension headache or trigeminal neuralgia, while a few headaches are a warning sign of malignant diseases such as brain tumors, hypertensive encephalopathy and brain hemorrhage. Headache itself rarely tells us directly whether it is a benign or malignant disease, so the only way to infer it is through other clues. If the headache comes on very quickly, occurs within seconds or minutes, and is an extremely sharp, swelling or bursting-like pain that is as severe as the worst headache you will ever experience in your life, it is likely that an intracerebral hemorrhage has occurred, a very serious condition that occurs when a weak blood vessel somewhere in the brain causes a rupture and blood flows into a specific part of the skull called the subarachnoid space. Due to the wrapping of the skull, the volume of the head is certain, and the excess volume occupied by the outflowing blood will crowd the space where the brain is located, causing pressure on the life center in severe cases, which can be life-threatening in a short period of time. Therefore if this sudden onset of severe and unbearable headache occurs, a subarachnoid hemorrhage may have occurred and medical attention needs to be sought as soon as possible. Moving on, there are many life-supporting organs in the chest, such as the heart, lungs and large blood vessels, and the presence of the rib cage provides protection for these vital organs. Chest pain can be a sign of many diseases in the chest, and if we are able to detect a dangerous aura in time, we can buy time to seek medical attention and add hope to save lives when these organs in the chest – the heart, lungs and large arteries – have life-threatening problems. Here is a look at the characteristics of chest pain in a serious and fatal disease. This fatal chest pain is like a boulder pressing, constricting, crushing or cutting pain, which is not only intense and lasts for more than half an hour, but sometimes this pain also strings to the left arm, shoulder or neck area, and nitroglycerin cannot relieve the pain, if such a situation occurs, you need to go to the emergency room or cardiology department quickly, because this chest pain may indicate myocardial infarction. Myocardial infarction is the death of heart cells due to ischemia. Our heart grows in the left side of the chest cavity and is the size of our own fist. The heart is actually a pump made of muscles, but the fluid flowing in this pump is not water but blood. Heartbeat does not stop, life does not stop. Each heartbeat is the sound produced by the contraction and diastole of this muscle pump, the function of this blood pump is that it is constantly transporting blood rich in oxygen and nutrients to every corner of the body, if the loss of fresh blood supply, the body’s cells will die. The heart is no exception, it itself also needs fresh oxygen and nutrient-rich blood, but the heart can not directly draw nutrients from the blood in this pump, so the task of supplying blood to the heart is given to the three important blood vessels creeping on the surface of the heart – the coronary arteries, if the coronary arteries have problems, such as long plaque appeared in the blood vessels If something goes wrong with the coronary arteries, such as a narrowing of the blood vessels due to plaque or a thrombus blocking the blood vessels, the heart cannot get enough blood supply, and the chest pain mentioned above will occur. This kind of chest pain often has some triggering causes before it occurs, such as overexertion and mood swings, which can cause the heart to consume more oxygen and aggravate the situation of heart hypoxia. If a myocardial infarction is not treated promptly, it may be life-threatening because the function of the heart pump is severely impaired. Therefore, if you are able to recognize the characteristics of chest pain in a fatal disease like myocardial infarction, you are adding a safety net to your life and that of your family. Turning to abdominal pain, there are hundreds of causes of stomach pain, and problems with various abdominal organs (such as the gastrointestinal tract, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, kidneys, and additionally the female internal genitalia such as the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uterus) can cause abdominal discomfort. Here are some urgent cases that require prompt medical attention: If abdominal pain occurs after overeating and alcohol abuse, and the pain is mainly in the upper abdomen, it continues to keep you on the edge of your seat, and is as severe as a knife cut. Sometimes the pain is strung to the back or left shoulder, accompanied by nausea, vomiting or fever, then it is possible that you have acute pancreatitis, which is caused by the destruction of the pancreas, a digestive and endocrine organ, by inflammation. When the above-mentioned situation of stomach pain occurs, it means that it is time to see a doctor. This is because if you do not seek medical attention in time, not only will the pain level be unbearable, but a series of life-threatening comorbidities will occur in heavy pancreatitis. If abdominal pain occurs in the upper abdomen after trauma or violence to the abdomen, the possibility of liver or spleen rupture should be considered. Rupture of the liver or spleen is a very serious and urgent situation and often requires surgery as soon as possible. If such abdominal pain is accompanied by dizziness or coma, the situation is even more serious, indicating that the blood loss due to rupture of the internal organs is so great that it has affected the blood supply to the brain, and if not treated promptly, it may lead to shock and death due to excessive internal bleeding. Women of childbearing age who experience abdominal pain must not ignore the possibility of ectopic pregnancy (i.e., ectopic pregnancy). An ectopic pregnancy is an embryo that develops outside the uterus and is like a time bomb that can rupture and bleed at any time, causing life-threatening injuries. The abdominal pain of ectopic pregnancy is often sudden, located in the lower abdomen, and is severe, such as dull, cramping or tearing pain, and may be accompanied by vaginal bleeding, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and sometimes the feeling of always wanting to go to the bathroom. Abdominal pain from ectopic pregnancy is often confused with abdominal pain from other causes, so you should tell your doctor about your menstrual status when you visit him/her. If an ectopic pregnancy is not recognized in time, it can end badly and the patient can go into shock or even die quickly due to rapid and massive internal abdominal bleeding caused by the rupture of the ectopic pregnancy. After understanding the pain signals in the head, chest and abdomen that may indicate fatal illness, let’s get familiar with what warning signs each bleeding from various parts of the body represents. In general, if blood is discharged from various openings in the body and outside, such as vomiting, hemoptysis, blood in the stool and hematuria, it is a sign of something more serious, and I believe most people will not ignore such obvious warning signs, and the diseases indicated by bleeding in various places are some of the following: coughing with bleeding is a warning sign of lung disease, commonly: pneumonia, tuberculosis, bronchial dilatation, lung cancer, or heart disease. Lung cancer, or a heart condition such as heart failure or heart valve stenosis. If bright red or dark red blood is vomited from the mouth, this often indicates abnormalities in the digestive system. Specific cases may be peptic ulcers, ruptured bleeding veins in the esophagus and stomach due to cirrhosis, acute gastric mucosal damage or even the possibility of gastric cancer. The site and amount of bleeding can cause the stool to appear different colors, such as bright red, dark red or black. These specific signs are clues to help us determine diseases, including hemorrhoids, anal fissures or bleeding from tumors of the rectum and colon. Blood in the urine, or urine that is the color of strong tea or flesh-washing water, indicates a urinary tract disorder. The organ producing the abnormality may be the kidney, ureter, bladder or urethra, and the type of lesion may be inflammation, stones, tuberculosis or tumor. dysfunction, can also lead to the appearance of hematuria. From the above information we can learn that the signs of bleeding can indicate intricate diseases and that a combination of other information from the body is needed to make an accurate judgment. One thing to note is that if one of these bleeding conditions occurs in the elderly, it is often not a good sign, especially if it is unfortunately accompanied by weight loss or prolonged low-grade fever, which is highly suspected to be a warning sign of cancer. Therefore, it is often necessary to seek prompt medical attention to identify the disease behind these abnormal signs. Finally, let’s talk about fever. The normal temperature on the surface of our body is 36.1-37.2℃, higher than 37.2 degrees is fever. Fever is a very common symptom, and the most common cause is a cold (also known medically as “upper respiratory tract infection”), which usually lasts about a week and recovers on its own. If the fever persists for a longer period of time, it is important to be aware that it may be a sign of tuberculosis or some other infectious disease, or an autoimmune disease such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, or it may even be a warning sign of a tumor. Although the above descriptions of some of the warning signs may not seem very pleasant, knowing more about the meaning of some abnormal signs can provide an additional layer of protection for good health. The disadvantage of these abnormal signals is that they often do not point to a specific disease, i.e. they do not allow us to find the specific malfunctioning component in the black box, so it is not only these abnormal signals that lead to a definite conclusion, but doctors also need to use physical examinations, blood tests and films to find traces of evidence to support or reject a diagnosis. In the famous medical drama “Dr. House”, the same set of clinical symptoms may cause different disease speculation, we can also hear in life in some difficult cases, different experts will be based on their knowledge and experience to put forward very different opinions, it can be seen that sometimes the search for the truth about the disease is very complicated. But for us ordinary people, we don’t have to consider such complicated issues, we just need to take more time for ourselves in our ordinary life and not ignore the abnormal signals from our body. For abnormal signals, we should pay attention to the time, location, characteristics and whether there are triggering factors for its appearance, as well as the specific process of symptom progression, all these information will provide very valuable clues for the doctor’s diagnosis. Health is the same as love, affection, etc. “Once I had a health in front of me, I did not cherish it, and only when I lost it did I regret it”. When this complex and delicate machine of the body is functioning normally, we do not feel its existence, but only when the machine breaks down, we appreciate its importance. In fact, the secret of maintaining good health is reflected in the little things in life: establish good eating and resting habits, reduce late nights, smoking, drinking and overeating, regular exercise, regular medical checkups, and seek medical attention in a timely manner when abnormal body signals are detected, so as not to delay the delay of the disease, so that the seeds of fatal diseases can be nipped in the bud.