We’ve seen people shedding tears of blood before, but this 12-year-old Yemeni girl’s problem is truly baffling. When Saadiya Saleh cries, her eyes release small, hard stones. They form under her eyelids and get pushed to the front of her eyes, emerging as tears.

Doctors are unable to explain the strange phenomenon because Saadiya isn’t suffering from any known disease. Yemen’s satellite TV channel, Azal, aired a video that shows stones forming in her eyes. She is surrounded by family members and doctors, while a helper wipes her eyes with a napkin. The footage also reveals a small box full of stones that collected from Saadiya’s eyes in a few hours.

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Dr. Jim Withers, from Pittsburgh, Pa., has dedicated the past 20 years of his life to treating the city’s homeless. He is known as the ‘street doctor’ because he dresses up like a homeless person and goes out at night to provide medical care to the real needy.

The extraordinary doctor started his unusual practice in 1992, along with Mike Sallows, a former homeless man. The two of them went out at night with backpacks of medicine. Withers estimates that he has treated over 1,200 homeless people a year since 1992.

Today, his initiative has evolved into a national network of medical students and volunteers who treat the homeless, four nights a week. The nightly service is now a nonprofit – Operation Safety Net. It is one of the first full-time street medicine programs in the United States.

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Kimi Sands suffers from a very strange condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), otherwise known as multiple personality disorder. The 23-year-old, from Cardiff, Wales, shares her body with 15 different personalities any one of which can take control at any time.

In the movies, people suffering from DID are often portrayed as dangerous criminals or serial killers. Not Kimi, though. None of her personalities make her do anything horrible. At worst, she and her partner Chris Lee need to buy Christmas presents for all 15, making the holidays more expensive for them.

“Including myself, there are 16 individuals to get presents for,” said Kimi. “These can be anything from alcohol for the older personalities to teddies for kids.” That’s right, the personalities all belong to different age groups. Among them are 22-year-old Japanese chef Satou, 17-year-old exercise addict Fiona, and four-year-old twins Jack and Safyer. There’s also a 23-year-old Yorkshire man, Ashy, and a party-loving bisexual, Theodore, aged 15.

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71-year-old Rosemary Jacobs has had silver-colored skin for the past 60 years. At age 11, she developed a rare condition called argyria – caused by exposure to chemical forms of the element silver that makes the skin turn blue or bluish-grey. For Rosemary, the exposure occurred from nasal drops containing colloidal silver.

Rosemary’s story is unbelievable;  Whoever heard of a real person turning silver after using silver nasal drops? You only get to see skin color changing in cartoons,  but apparently the condition is real, and Rosemary has had to live a life of stigma because of it. Of course, her skin didn’t change color overnight. In fact, she was diagnosed with argyria four years after she began using the medication.

Rosemary, a retired Spanish teacher from Vermont, U.S., said: “When I was 11 years old, my mother mentioned to an ENT specialist that I always had a cold. He told me that it had to be allergies and prescribed nose drops that contained silver, recommending that I take them ‘as needed’.” She did as she was told, using the drops every time she had a stuffy nose.

At first, no could notice any difference in Rosemary’s skin, not even her parents. “The change in my color was so slow, I didn’t notice. My family and friends didn’t notice either because they saw me every day,” she said.

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Dentists have always warned us that too much candy will cause cavities. But all that could be a thing of the past, thanks to a new experiment by scientists from the Berlin biotechnology firm, OrganoBalance.

It turns out that candy doesn’t cause cavities at all. The bad guys are actually the bacteria that remain on our teeth after we eat sugary treats. So the scientists’ logic was simple – reduce the amount of ‘bad’ bacteria in candy, and the chances of cavities should naturally decrease.

After you eat a normal piece of candy, the bacteria on your teeth slowly release an acid that eats into tooth enamel. When the enamel wears down, it causes cavities to develop. One of the most common strains of bacteria responsible for cavities is mutans streptococci. When you chew candy, this bacteria is released into the saliva. If you swallow or spit, some of the bacteria is removed, but the remaining sits on your teeth and causes them to rot.

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19-year-old Delfina Cedeno has been suffering from a rare disorder for the past four years – she has been crying and sweating blood. Occasionally, blood also seeps out of her fingernails, belly button and nostrils.

Doctors at Delfina’s home town of Vernon, in the Dominican Republic, were baffled for a long time. Even after hundreds of tests, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. In fact, no one believed Delfina until they actually saw her bleeding.

“At first, no one could help me and they looked at me like a crazy person when I told them what was going on,” the teenager said. “It was only when I started bleeding in front of a doctor one day that they began to take me seriously.” Things got totally out of hand when she bled for up to 15 days and was in such a critical condition that she needed a blood transfusion.

Delfina herself was scared to death and extremely stressed out with her horrifying condition. “When this started happening, I didn’t know what to think. I was terrified and in complete shock.” She also felt ashamed to leave home. Read More »

Dr. Ted Rummel thought his life was pretty much over when he was left paralyzed from the waist-down in 2010. The exceptional surgeon had been diagnosed with a cavernous hemangioma – a blood filled cyst – in the middle of his spinal cord a year earlier. Neurologists told him the cyst couldn’t be surgically removed, as the procedure would paralyze him instantly. Instead he was told to rest, wait, and pray the cyst never ruptured.

Unfortunately for Dr. Rummel, the cyst did burst in September 2010, just a week after he performed a rotator cuff surgery on his wife Kathy – his last surgery for the next two years. He suffered a terrible back ache, followed by numbness and weakness in his legs. Within days, “a wave crashed over his lower body and took all feeling and mobility with it.” Dr. Rummel was paralyzed for life.

It’s sad that something so terrible should have happened to him, after he cured thousands of people in St. Charles County of pain and stiffness in their joints. In his best days, he had practiced over 1,000 surgeries per year in O’Fallon, Missouri.

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Lucy Luckayanko is perhaps the only New Yorker to have an eye-stud. She spent $3,000 on a one-minute procedure to have a heart-shaped piece of platinum inserted into the white of her right eyeball.

Harvard and NYU-trained Dr. Chynn performed the procedure. Interestingly, he has been featured here on OC before. He made news last August as a love-crazed doctor desperate to find his soul-mate. He spent thousands of dollars on high-end matchmaking services and charity donations in exchange for dates. When nothing worked out, he began to offer free cosmetic procedures to anyone who would introduce him to the girl of his dreams. Going by this, we don’t know if Lucy has had to pay for her treatment or got it free in exchange for setting up Dr. Chynn on a date. In any case, she went ahead with it and now she looks like she has a piece of dirt stuck in her eye forever.

It seems doctors have done this procedure several times in Europe and Los Angeles, but this was New York’s first. To perform it, Dr. Chynn first injected an anesthetic into Lucy’s eye. Then he made a tiny incision to “try to divide a pocket in between the sclera (the white part) and the conjunctiva (the clear part)” of her eye. Using forceps, he placed the 3.5mm platinum stud in a drop of water on Lucy’s eye membrane. Since the stud is so small, it had to be floated into position. It was all over in a matter of minutes and Lucy went home with her new bejeweled eye soon after.

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Turkey’s delicious baklava and its crowded Grand Bazaar have always attracted tourists, but now there’s a new reason why men are flocking to the transcontinental country – bushier mustaches and beards. No, it’s not something in the air that makes your face hairier, but there are clinics specialized in this matter, so gentlemen, if you want a manlier look, Turkey is the place to go.

The mustache has had an important role in society since time immemorial and although some cultures have abandoned it as a fashion icon, others have kept it and made a tradition out of wearing it. Today, the mustache is pretty popular especially in the Middle East and parts of Asia: when it comes to politics, the mustache is among the elements that capture the differences between the Western world, where being clean shaved is considered a sign of stability and maturity, and the Eastern world, where the mustache is a mark of traditionalism.  All in all, politics or not, the mustache is a sign of pure masculinity and a fashion statement. Hipsters know what I mean. Getting the mustache you’ve always dreamed of is possible through a simple medical procedure called follicle-hair extraction. In medical terms, the procedure implies removing hair from hairier areas and implanting it into the mustache or beard area. In laymen terms, the follicle-hair extraction means recycling your own hair. I’m just wondering, what would be the most suitable area of the body to provide the hair for the implant?

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Isaac Brown is a 5-year-old boy from Iowa who suffers from a rare genetic condition which makes him immune to pain, but not to the effects of his frequent injuries. Painful falls, deep cuts and other agonizing injuries that normally make children scream at the top of their lungs and cry out for their parents, don’t determine any kind of reaction from little Isaac. Even after he broke his pelvis by falling from playground equipment, he calmly acknowledged that something was wrong, but he didn’t feel pain.

Isaac was born with a congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) and, according to his parents, the first years of his life years were especially hard as the boy “would just drop to the ground and smack his face on the table. He thought the fall was fun.” Unaware of the damage he was doing to his body, he also put his hands on a working oven burner and one time cut himself with sharp pieces from a mug he had broken. His parents sought medical help but were disappointed to find that his condition was untreatable. The only advice medics were able to give the couple was to teach Isaac to recognize pain. He now knows that bleeding is bad but he is still unable to understand that there are different levels of pain which vary in intensity. While he understands that his father accidentally stepping on him is painful, he doesn’t recognize that a cat brushing against him, while it might be unpleasant to some, should not hurt. Unfortunately, Isaac’s response in both of these situations is the same “Ow” that his parents thought him to say.

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Unsatisfied with her looks, Candice Armstrong, a former barmaid from London, started going to the gym and working out for three hours a day. After two years, Candice still wasn’t getting the results she wanted, so she began taking steroids and ultimately became addicted to them. Today, the young body-building enthusiast has virtually transformed into a man, with unusually broad shoulders, noticeable stubble and developing male sexual organs.

Candice, who suffers from body dysmorphia, has always been dissatisfied with her womanly looks, especially her upper body which she thought was too thin. “I hated my body. My hips and legs were too big and my arms and torso too skinny. I thought I was out of proportion and not attractive. I’d never had a proper relationship with a man,” Candice says. She soon found herself at the gym, lifting weights and doing push-ups to improve her physique, but after a couple of years of hard work, she still wasn’t ripped enough. Candice stepped up her game becoming obsessed with the way she looked and working out for three hours a day.  Without giving it too much thought, she also started taking daily doses of Trenbolone – a steroid normally used by veterinarians to increase muscle growth in animals. She thought the steroids would finally help her have the bulky upper-body she had always wanted. “After a year, everyone said I had Madonna arms but I wanted them bigger. I heard about steroids and bought them online,” she explains. “When I started taking them I trained very hard. It enabled me to build more muscle and I was making gains I could see.”

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All eight members of the Pullan family from Delhi suffer from a rare genetic disorder called albinism which, as its name suggests, is characterized by the complete or partial absence of melanin pigment in the skin and hair. Because of this condition, Rosetauri Pullan, his wife Mani along with their three daughters Renu, Deepa and Pooja and three sons Shankar, Ramkishan and Vijay all have fair skin, white hair and light colored eyes despite being Indian.

Their ghostliness is not just an aesthetic problem. It actually comes with certain undesirable medical problems. Their pale white skin makes it impossible for them to stay in the sun for too long. The lack of pigment in their eyes have left them short-sighted and Shankar was even forced to attended a school for the blind. “All we know is that we can’t see properly, and we can’t sit under the sun for long, but we live the best we can,” the family explains. Unfortunately sunburns and short-slightness are not their only concerns. There are only 17,000 people in the world who suffer from albinism and those who are unfortunate to live in less developed countries, like the Pullans, are harshly discriminated against.

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Meet 22-year-old Xiaolian. He is not wearing some bizarre special effects makeup, that is actually a real nose growing on his forehead. As strange as it looks, this is apparently a pretty common nose reconstruction technique.

No too long ago, Xiaolian was involved in a car accident that damaged his nose. After he refused medical treatment, the wound became infected and in a few months time the bacteria had corroded the cartilage of the nose, making it impossible for doctors to save. But since we’re living in an age where medical miracles are possible, they decided to remove the infected tissue and grow the young man a new nose. This was done by by placing a skin tissue expander onto Xiaolian’s forehead, cutting it into the shape of a nose and planting a cartilage taken from his ribs. It’s taken Chinese doctors in Fuzhou, Fujian province, nine months to grow the nose, but it was worth it, because the organ developed perfectly and it’s almost ready to be shifted in it the place of Xiaolian’s original nose. Read More »

People unhappy with the way they look have been using plastic surgery to change their appearance for years, but now they can take their obsession to a whole new level by changing the color of their eyes through a controversial procedure known as artificial iris implant.

Pioneered by Dr. Kenneth Rosenthal, as a way to correct various eye defects (heterochromia, ocular albinism, etc.), the artificial iris implant procedure is now also being advertised as cosmetic surgery for people who want to permanently change the color of their eyes. The artificial iris is a thin, non-toxic prosthesis made of the same ophthalmic grade silicone used in intraocular lenses. Since the fake iris is very flexible, it can be folded and inserted into the eye through a peripheral corneal surgical incision about 2.8 mm long, and unfolded over the natural iris. According to the website of BrightOcular, the company behind the increasingly popular cosmetic eye surgery, the procedure is “short, safe, and painless”, taking about 15 minutes for each eye. The surgery has a purely cosmetic purpose, it does not fix vision defects, so patients will still need to wear refractive instruments to correct their vision. Unlike other laser-based procedures that remove a layer of melanin from the iris in order to permanently change its color, BrightOcular claims their iris implant can easily be removed in case of complications or if the patient so desires.

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Squeezing a slice of lime into a refreshing drink on a hot summer day isn’t as harmless as you may think. Fredrikke and Selma, two young Norwegian girls, found that out first hand after they suffered from severe Margarita Dermatitis during their vacation in Spain.

Fredrikke and Selma, both seven years old, were vacationing with their families in the Spanish resort of Marbella. One day, during an outdoor lunch, they spotted a lime tree and thought it would be fun to squeeze juice out of its fruits. They went at it for about an hour, enthusiastically squeezing dozens of limes, before going to the beach for a swim, one of the girls’ parents told Norwegian website, Klikk.  But when Fredrikke woke up the next morning, both her hands were swollen and the skin felt tender to the touch. Thinking it might be a reaction to mosquito bites, her mother, Kathryn, gave the girl an allergy pill. Only when they met up with Selma’s family and noticed she presented the exact same symptoms, it became clear that what ever was affecting them had something to do with the limes they had squeezed the other day. After a few hours, both Fredrikke and Selma started complaining of burning pain and their hands began to blister. On the morning of the third day, Fredrikke’s hands looked even worse and her parents knew they had to seek medical help as soon as possible. They jumped on the first plane home, gave the girl painkillers so she could sleep during the flight, and rushed her to the emergency room as soon as they landed in Oslo. Selma and her family had another week of vacation left so they went to the hospital in Marbella.

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