For thousands of years, people believed that the full moon has magical powers: according to legends, it was on the full moon that vampires, werewolves and witches became active.
Nowadays, the approach of the full moon no longer forces people to hang themselves with amulets and remember the words of prayer, but lunar calendars, suggesting the best time for surgery or cosmetic masks, are still popular.
Such a belief, based on the change in the phases of the moon, makes skeptics only grin. However, a statement by American surgeons last week suggests that the full moon does indeed affect the human body.
Doctors have noticed that the death rate among people undergoing heart surgery during or just after the full moon is significantly lower.
“We found that the chances of a quick recovery were significantly higher in those patients who underwent surgery immediately after the moon waned. We also found that the full moon shortens the length of stay in the hospital for these patients,”says heart surgeon Frank Sellke.
The reports of American doctors confirm his words: indeed, people who underwent surgery during the full moon were in the hospital for an average of ten days, but patients who were operated on in other phases of the lunar cycle spent about 14 days in a hospital.
This type of lunar influence, known as the "Transylvania effect", has long attracted the attention of medical experts and prompts them to conduct a thorough study of the nature of this phenomenon.
For example, doctors from the central hospital in Augsburg, Germany, analyzed the medical histories of 16,000 hearts, and found that the number of heart attacks dropped significantly within three days after the new moon.
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Some experts believe that such changes may be caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, affecting heart function and fluid flow in the human body. This theory is supported by the results of a study by British urologists, according to which the number of patients with renal colic increases during the full moon.
However, the moon influences not only the functions of the cardiovascular and urinary systems, but also the functioning of the brain: Dutch researchers found that the number of urgent hospitalizations of the mentally ill increased during the full moon periods.