yup. so i heard stated as a fact that if a person is seriously ill, they don’t yawn, supposedly because they can’t be bothered to waste energy on something like that when they need to use it all for surviving. no other explanation given. the internet let me down on this one, so i came to where the truly intelligent reside.
is it really true that seriously ill people don’t yawn? do doctors use yawning as a sign that a patient’s condition is improving?
That’s all well and good but do you have a cite to something online that talks aboput this (or a reference to a published article)?
I’m not trying to bust your chops about this but it sounds like an old wives tale. I recall seeing a show that discussed yawning and while most every animal (or at least mammal) seems to do it no one is really sure why. There was speculation but not much beyond that. I’d be surprised that someone would sit and watch sick people to count how many times they yawn considering they don’t know why people yawn in the first place. Then again I’ve seen some pretty weird research done on the craziest things so who knows…maybe someone would do this.
that would be the reason i posted here. i haven’t been able to find any evidence of this fact in any articles on the internet. (the stack of science magazines in the basement still awaits scouring, but i doubt i’ll be in much luck.)
the reason this whole thing came up: a few weeks back, some friends of mine and i were watching a tv show in which a terminally ill patient was lying in a hospital bed. at one point, the focus of the scene was in the two people discussing in the front, but in the background the patient could be seen yawning. my friend, wiseass that he is, could not resist informing us that this fact completely destroyed any credibility of the character’s illness since people who are that ill shouldn’t yawn. got me wondering.