On the inside, does it lead anywhere? Could the umbilical joining point (before it’s buttoned up) be kept open somehow at birth and used later in life as a nutrient feeding point?
A stark contrast exists between the physiologic importance of the umbilicus during development and after birth. During development, the umbilicus functions as a channel allowing blood flow between the placenta and fetus. It also serves an important role in the development of the intestine and the urinary system. After birth, once the umbilical cord falls off, no evidence of these connections should be present. Nevertheless, umbilical disorders are frequently encountered in pediatric surgery. These disorders range from the very common umbilical hernia to infections such as omphalitis, which can be life threatening. Most patients with umbilical problems present with a mass or drainage from the umbilicus.
After “cutting the cord”, a stump exists which contains the remnants of the two umbilical arteries and the umbilical vein. The umbilical route is occasionally used to give fluids to babies in dire straits. Theoretically it could be used for nutrition, although I’d imagine this to be extremely uncommon. It has been done in pigs:
It remains a little controversial in people (IANA pediatrician/neonatologist):
TPN (total parental nutrition) is generally used as a last resort when the gut simply doesn’t work. It apparently is used with an umbilical catheter when no alternative exists, usually with a double lumen. So I guess the answer to your question is “yes”. There is a risk of fluid ending up in the wrong place, nd the procedure is not done routinely by any means – e.g.
http://www.hkcr.org/publ/Journal/vol4no4/full/288-290%20Neonatal.pdf
**What’s on the other side of a bellybutton? **
A hernia waiting to happen.
Goddam . . . One more thing to worry about . . .
When I open a belly, I always run the scalpel to the left side of the bellybutton. This is so I can see the dried up remnant of the umbilical vein. Some people call it the falciform ligament. It’s a solid cord that runs from the underside of the umbilicus to the gristle that outlines the division between the left and right lobes of the liver.
In normal people since about a week after birth, the falciform ligament is a solid cord. While you were a fetus, it was an open tube. Sometimes in older people it opens back up into a tube. You see this in alcoholics with bad cirrhosis. It is behind the medical sign of cirrhosis, caput medusae, the head of the medusa.
I always look at it in a baby autopsy to see if it had closed yet. It runs upward from the back of your bellybutton towards your liver. The umbilical arteries run downward from the back of your bellybutton towards your iliac arteries. One more thing, the urachus, runs downward from the back of your bellybutton to the top of your bladder. The urachus is the remnant of a time when your bladder had more to do than it has now (few weeks after your conception, been useless since then). The umbilical arteries and urachus are gone in normal adults; nothing to look for.
Behind the umbilical arteries and vein and urachus is a layer of peritoneum, which looks like Saran wrap and has rainbows across it in bright light, and then there’s your guts.
We place an umbilical arterial catheter and an umbilical venous catheter on all our preemies for TPN, etc. The site stays good for a week or two, but then craps out and the little gus get peripheral IV’s (or, hopefully, no IV’s!)
Whats left of the (internal) unbilicus eventually just turns into a ligament like remnant. There is no connection from it to anywhere shortly after birth.
When you feed a person directly into their veins, TPN as Dr Paprika has said, their bodies get unhappy. We aren’t designed to absorb food directly through the bellybutton once we stop being fetuses. The guts are the largest endocrine organ in the body; they secrete all sorts of hormones when we are fed that help us control how much of what we eat ends up as blood sugar and how much as fat, how much hunger we feel, how much energy we derive. When you bypass all those complex feeding-back loops of hormones, you get trouble. I have autopsied an infant who developed cirrhosis from prolonged TPN in the neonatal ICU. That isn’t an unheard of complication.
Hey, I just learned today from a patient’s family about a new class of anti-diabetes drugs, the incretin mimetics, which work by making your guts release a hormone I’ve never even heard of, incretin. They must not have known about incretin when I was in school. Apparently this incretin enhances the normal release of insulin after a carbohydrate meal, slows the gastric absorption of nutrients and calories, and promotes a feeling of satiety. The family member said specifically that he and his daughter-in-law dropped weight like crazy, but the side effects of nausea and the requirement for daily injection were too much for him to take.
Incretin is just one of the many hormones your gut secretes in response to food. You don’t want to lose all those benefits just because you have a bellybutton. Also, we only learned about incretin recently. You’re better off not messing with a complex system when you know you don’t understand all of it.
So although you could be fed through your bellybutton, you’d be sorry, for reasons you won’t even know about until you try.
I am so glad somebody asked this. I’ve always wondered. If I’d been guessing, I would have come up with something really close to the OP’s username.