Before answering the question of how many ribs a person has, it is necessary to give the concept of a rib and determine its purpose. An rib is an arched bone that runs from the spine to the chest and forms the rib cage. The chest, in turn, protects against damage the soft tissues, vital organs of the person: heart, lungs, liver and others.
Ribs run in pairs, each person has 12 pairs of ribs. The first 7 are called true, the remaining 5 are false. The lower 4 ribs are called oscillating - they depart from the spine, but do not close on the sternum. It would seem that the only true answer to the question of how many ribs a person has is: 24 ribs. However, you can meet people who have 13 or 11 pairs of ribs. Sometimes such an anomaly is due to congenital characteristics of the body, and sometimes it is the result of surgery. Perhaps someone will be puzzled by the fact that people voluntarily lie down under the surgeon’s knife, removing part of the skeleton. Women perform this operation, wanting to get a thin wasp waist and narrow the chest. Men - wanting to satisfy themselves orally. It is difficult to judge how justified these changes are, contrary to nature itself. After all, no matter how many ribs a person has, there are definitely no extra ribs among them.
A few hundred years ago, when medicine was in its infancy, the exact answer to the question of how many ribs a person had perplexed the most advanced doctors. One thing they could say with confidence - men should have one rib less than women. After all, the Bible says that God created the wife of Adam from his rib, which means that men have not enough one rib since then. For many centuries this fact did not require proof, and enthusiastic healers who performed autopsies trying to get to the truth were declared heretics and sentenced to death. Therefore, the answer to the question of how many pairs of ribs a person had was found only in the 16th century.
The modern interpretation of this passage from the Bible is slightly different. Church employees no longer refute the scientifically proven medical fact that the number of ribs in a person does not depend on his gender. Now they claim that Adam didn’t really have one rib, but this feature could not be inherited, as head injuries, amputated fingers or a remote appendix are not transmitted. Thus, religion and medicine today have ceased to contradict each other.
Rib fracture is one of the most common chest injuries . Most often, the ribs in the middle break. The lower, mobile and flexible, less likely to be hit, and the upper two pairs protect the humerus and collarbone. Most often, the ribs break when falling, in an accident, in fights. The danger of a fracture also lies in the fact that in addition to the ribs, internal organs are also hit. A bone fragment can stick into a lung or large vessel, causing bleeding. If open injuries of the ribs can be seen immediately (these are penetrating wounds in the chest with gunshot or knife wounds), then a closed injury can only be diagnosed by a specialist.
Symptoms of a fracture - chest pain, worse on exhalation, hematomas, rapid shallow breathing, bleeding from the upper respiratory organs and internal bleeding.
A fracture of one, in rare cases of two ribs, is treated at home after a visit to a traumatologist. The doctor makes an x-ray of the chest and, in uncomplicated cases, prescribes analgesics, physiotherapeutic procedures and expectorants to the patient. Also, the patient is prescribed therapeutic exercises to improve lung ventilation and complete rest. The rib heals in about a month if there are no associated injuries. Otherwise, the recovery period may take 2-3 months or more.