Top 5 medical things that sound like bullshit but are true

verycooltrash:

there’s a condition called Fournier’s Gangrene that will straight up make your dick rot off. it is probably how king herod died in the bible

in 1978 a russian scientist named anatoli bugorski stuck his head in a particle accelerator (picture a small CERN or fermilab) and got shot right through, front to back by a near-lightspeed proton beam. he actually survived surprisingly okay: the affected part of his face was paralyzed, he lost all hearing in that side’s ear, got a barely perceptible cognitive impairment and suffered from seizures. oh i’m sorry, did i say that in the past tense? he’s still alive

the bacteria in your intestines are hitching a ride and snacking on some of your nutrients waiting fo you to die. that’s when their main course begins: you

robert liston was a 19C scottish surgeon. he pioneered the correlation between speed of a surgery and lower complications, which is why he trained to do them as fast as possible. this didn’t always work out all that well, as exemplified in 2 separate leg amputations he performed in under 3 minutes: in one, he took the patient’s nuts off as well. the second, more famous operation, was history’s only procedure with a 300% mortality rate: the patient died anyway from the gangrene, a surgical assistant’s fingers got accidentally lopped off, who was admitted and also died of hospital borne gangrene, and a knife also flew at a spectator, who died “from the fright.” absolute lad

if you ever find yourself surviving in the north pole, do not eat polar bear liver because you will die of vitamin poisoning