Tegan Taylor

It's the show where we answer the health questions everyone is asking.

Music.

Well, yeah, we're talking about things that maybe are useless, question mark.

Jane and Cass have both emailed us.

Jane says, I'm about to have my gallbladder removed.

My question is, how does the body compensate if at all without this organ?

Cass is also on the wait list to have her gallbladder removed and is wondering if we can remove bits such as tonsils, gallbladders, appendices, etc., why do we have them in the first place?

So, yes, let us talk today about what some people might think of as vestigial organs.

Others sort of feel like maybe we could call them nice-to-haves, maybe not must-haves.

Well, I mean, we did do a whole... Or three in my case.

Wisdom teeth, we did a whole episode of What's That Rash on wisdom teeth fairly early in the piece.

I went back and refreshed my memory on it.

You should too by searching wisdom teeth in the What's That Rash feed.

And I was surprised to find that they are less useful than I thought.

than I thought, that there are certain, especially certain ethnic groups that are much less likely to have wisdom teeth at all than others.

So that's one thing.

I think everyone, when I think about vestigial parts of the human body, I think about the tailbone, the coccyx, which, I mean, the name is there.

We used to, well, our ancestors had tails.

We don't.

There's still a bone there.