After suffering from pain on the right side of her nose for most of her life, a New Zealand woman was shocked to discover a plastic board game piece that had apparently been stuck in her nostril for 37 years.

Mary McCarthy, from Christchurch in New Zealand, had always struggled with pain and breathing difficulties on the right side of her nose, but having put up with it since childhood, she never bothered seeing a doctor about it. But last October, following ab excruciatingly painful nasal swab test for Covid-19, her nasal issue got even worse. Her nose would be leaking constantly and she was in a lot of pain, so she finally decided to get medical help.

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DentalSlim Diet Control is a controversial weight loss device designed to allow wearers to open their mouths only about 2mm, thus making them unable to chew while making breathing and speaking possible.

Developed by scientists at University of Otago, in New Zealand, the DentalSlim Diet Control is an intra-oral device that can be attached to the wearer’s upper and lower back teeth by a dental professional. It features unique custom-manufactured locking bolts powered by magnets, which, when activated, only allow a mouth opening of about 2 mm, restricting the wearer to a liquid diet, while allowing them to breathe and speak normally. Apparently, the developers of the DentalSlim Diet Control believe that it can play a role in the fight against the global obesity epidemic.

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Chinese media recently covered a shocking beauty trend that allegedly has young girls getting nerves in their legs severed so that their calves appear slimmer.

It’s crazy the extreme lengths some people will go in the name of beauty, or at least their idea of beauty. Take for example this new and disturbing trend reportedly dubbed “calf blocking”, which essentially has young, healthy girls getting “less important” nerves in their legs surgically severed to permanently atrophy their calf muscles, so that their lower legs appear slimmer and straighter.

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Raynaud syndrome, also known as Raynaud’s phenomenon, is a rare medical condition that limits blood supply to fingers, and sometimes to the toes, causing them to temporarily turn white or blue.

Named after physician Auguste Gabriel Maurice Raynaud, who first described it in his doctoral thesis in 1862, this rare condition can be described as an overreaction to stimuli like cold or stress. In the case of the former, the body tries to conserve heat by slowing down the flow of blood to the farthest points, such as the fingers. To do that, the small arteries that carry blood to those points constrict, thus causing the extremities to temporarily turn white, and then blue, due to the prolonged lack of oxygen in the affected area.

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A Florida man and his three sons have been indicted for allegedly selling a dangerous chemical mix called “Miracle Mineral Solution” (MMS) as a cure for Covid-19 and dozens of other serious health conditions.

62-year-old Mark Grenon and his three adult sons, Jonathan, Jordan and Joseph stand accused of marketing and selling tens of thousands of bottles of MMS all over the United States, claiming that it could treat, prevent and cure Covid-19, as well as other diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, HIV/Aids, malaria, and even autism. Prosecutors dispute those claims, saying that Miracle Mineral Solution is actually a solution that, when ingested, becomes “chlorine dioxide, a powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp, and paper”.

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A 17-year-old Indonesian girl who occasionally falls asleep for several days at a time has been dubbed a “real-life Sleeping Beauty” or the “sleeping daughter of South Kalimantan.

Echa, who hails from Banjarmasin, in Indonesia’s South Kalimantan region, first made news headlines in 2017, when national news outlets reported that she slept for 13 days straight. She has experienced two worrying episodes since then, when she slept for about a day and a half, but last week Echa’s condition worsened and she fell into a deep sleep for about seven days. Her parents took her to the Ansari Saleh hospital in Banjarmasin, but her tests came out fine. The teenager finally woke up after a total of nine days, but doctors say that she is still very weak.

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A Filipino man who had been experiencing sharp chest pains in cold weather, learned that he had a four-inch-long knife blade lodged in his chest after doing a routine X-ray.

25-year-old Kent Ryan Tomao was more than a bit confused when doctors told him that he had an an “object resembling a knife” stuck in his chest, very close to one of his lungs. He had undergone an X-ray exam required to apply for a mining job in Agusan del Sur, and never imagined there was anything wrong with him. He told doctors in Kidapawan City that he had sometimes experienced stabbing pains in his chest on unusually cold days, but didn’t think too much of them. He certainly didn’t think there was a knife blade in his chest.

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Doctors recently reported the bizarre case of a 25-year-old woman suffering from an incredibly rare medical condition that caused her to bleed from her eyes during her monthly period.

Haemolacria, the condition that causes people to cry blood, is extremely rare, but Indian doctors documented the case of a woman with a similar, but even rarer condition called “ocular vicarious menstruation”. As the name suggests, it causes female sufferers to bleed from their eyes, but only during their monthly period. The 25-year-old woman, whose name was not revealed for privacy reasons, visited the emergency room at a hospital in Chandigarh, complaining about crying blood. All her tests came back normal, and it was only after the woman revealed that the same thing had occurred around the same time the month before that doctors made the connection to menstruation.

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A Scottish woman suffering from a rare condition called misophonia is so annoyed by the sound of other people’s breathing that she once asked doctors to surgically make her deaf.

Misophonia is described as a strong dislike or hatred of specific sounds, which triggers strong  emotional or physiological responses that would be considered unreasonable by most people. Also known as “sound sensitivity syndrome”, this condition can trigger all kinds of reactions, from anger to panic, or the need to flee and escape the maddening sound. Think of a sound that drives you crazy, multiply it by a factor of 100 and you can get an idea of what experiencing misophonia feels like.

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Indonesian police are investigating the strange case of a 25-year-old woman who claims that she gave birth just an hour after a gust of wind got her pregnant.

The young woman, identified as Siti Zainah, ahs become the subject of widespread ridicule in Indonesia after claiming to have been impregnated by a gust of wind, on February 10. Furthermore, Zainah added that she gave birth to a baby girl just an hour after the alleged impregnation. According to several Indonesian news outlets, the 25-year-old was relaxing at home in Cianjur, West Java, with her first child, when she felt the wind enter her body. A few minutes later, she went into labor.

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Human curiosity has been at the core of many breakthroughs throughout history, but its outcome isn’t always positive. The the case of this 12-year-old boy who swallowed dozens of magnetic balls, just to see if metal would stick to his stomach.

Rhiley Morrison, and English schoolboy from Greater Manchester, had to undergo life-saving surgery after deliberately swallowing 54 magnets as part of a dumb experiment. The wannabe Magneto ingested the magnets he had received for Christmas to see if metal objects would stick to his stomach, and also what the metallic balls would look like when he passed them. Unfortunately, things didn’t go according to plan, and after days went by without him passing a single magnet, he finally told his mom.

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A 38-year-old man is warning other AirPod users about the danger of swallowing the wireless ear buds, after accidentally ingesting one in his sleep, and undergoing surgery to have it removed.

Last Tuesday morning, after waking up in his home in Worcester, Massachusetts, Brad Gauthier noticed that one of his AirPods was missing. He had fallen asleep with them on, but he didn’t think much of the loss, as AirPods falling off isn’t exactly unheard of. Gauthier reportedly went about his day as usual, ignoring the slight discomfort in his chest, but when he tried to drink a glass of water, something strange happened.

As Brad Gauthier tried to have a drink of water, his throat simply filled up and he started chocking. He was able to get the water out by leaning forward, and carried on as if nothing had happened, even clearing his driveway of snow, after a severe blizzard. But the though of the missing AirPod started bugging him again, especially since he couldn’t find it, even with the help of his wife and son.

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44-year-old Niel Kenmuir suffers from aphantashia, a rare and strange medical condition that prevents him from visualizing things in his head.

Niel first realized that there was something different about his brain when he was in primary school. He had trouble falling asleep at night, so his step-father told him to close his eyes and visualize a flock of sheep and count them as they jump over a fence, one by one. The problem was he couldn’t see anything when he closed his eyes, no sheep, no fence, nothing. Later on, he would discover that he had a blind mind’s eye, which means he cannot visualize anything, not even the face of loved ones.

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Doctors recently reported the strange case of a 30-year-old man who injected magic mushrooms into his bloodstream, only to find that they had started growing in his veins.

The Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry published a case report about a man who sought to self-medicate for opioid dependence and depression by injecting magic mushrooms directly into his blood. Referred to as “Mr. X”, for anonymity purposes, the man had reportedly been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had stopped taking his prescribed medication. Instead, he had started researching the therapeutic effects of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic found in over 200 species of mushrooms, as a way to treat his condition and decrease his reliance on opioids. The compound had been shown to be effective in treating symptoms like depression and anxiety in numerous medical trials, but only when consumed orally. Mr. X had other plans…

The protagonist of this strange story reportedly managed to get his hands on psychedelic mushrooms, which he boiled to obtain a “tea”, which he then proceeded to filter through a cotton swab, and then inject directly into his bloodstream.

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In a world where fingerprints are the most collected and used biometric data, having no fingerprints is both a blessing and a curse, as the men in the Sarker family can attest.

For several generations, Sarker men have been born with completely smooth fingertips, and while that may not have been a huge deal a generation or two ago, nowadays, when the swirling patterns on the tip of our fingers are used as the main way to identify individuals, it’s an issue. For example, some of the men in the Bangladeshi family have been unable to obtain a driving license because of their lack of fingerprints, while others have been reluctant to travel for fear of getting in trouble at airports, for the same reason.

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