Doctors Still Can't Explain These 10 Medical Miracles
The human body is a puzzle to be solved. And, as far as science and medicine have progressed—and they have—the molecular machines that humans are are simply too complex to understand in every minute, nuanced detail. Physicians still come across puzzles on a regular basis, and some of them have been downright bizarre.
Throughout history, patients have made seemingly impossible recoveries when all seemed to be lost or faded away for no apparent cause. Even when life and death were not on the table, people grew, secreted, emitted, and even became things you could never imagine.
With that in mind, this list will compile a collection of medical anomalies that may be fantastic, awful, or simply odd, but which doctors have yet to explain.
As unbelievable as it may seem to us, there have been a few documented cases of people being beheaded and surviving. The reason for this is that the injury is an internal decapitation (also known as an orthopedic decapitation or atlanto-occipital dislocation), which occurs when the skull and spine split but the skin and surrounding tissue around the bones stay sealed. The head is only joined to the body by limp, soft tissue as a result of this injury.
The facts are as follows: 70% of people who experience an internal decapitation die instantaneously, another 28% die within hours, and the remaining 2% of those who survive are almost all paralyzed for life. Despite this, Jordan Taylor, a nine-year-old kid who was internally decapitated in a vehicle accident in 2008, healed almost completely within three months and walked out of the hospital on his own.
"He's like a little boy again...walking—I he's have to urge him to slow down," says the boy's mother, Stacey. This is the most amazing Christmas miracle I've ever seen."
The case of Gloria Ramirez, widely known as "The Toxic Lady," is one that is heavy on the mystery side of miraculous but low on the fortunate side. Ramirez went to the emergency hospital on February 19, 1994, because she was having heart palpitations. Then Ramirez, the doctors in her room, and the air around them all changed into something as lethal as it was perplexing.
The nurses noticed Ramirez's body behaving abnormally while treating her. Her skin had become oily, and she emanated two weird odors: one garlicky, the other ammonia-like. The staff began to feel nauseated and dizzy. A nurse was the first to pass out, followed by a doctor.
Ramirez died that night, but not before her strange biochemistry made 23 others sick, five of whom required hospitalization. It's still unclear what made the Lady so toxic, though it could be related to her use of dimethyl sulfoxide.
Phineas Gage is a legend in his own right. Not because he didn't exist; he lived a perfectly genuine life, but because one of his accidents has become "one of the great medical mysteries of all time," according to some psychiatrists. Gage's head was pierced all the way through by a huge iron rod when he was 25, resulting in the rapid removal of much of his frontal lobe and a profound transformation in Gage's personality from that day forward.
Due to Gage's attention while working as a blasting foreman, the rod, a tamping iron, shot through and out of his brain. From then on, every facet of Gage's life becomes fascinating. Despite the fact that Gage's "memory and general intelligence were unaffected after the accident," his physician and employers both felt that his demeanor had changed for the worse.
Gage was "fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating," according to his physician. Gage continued to make atypical decisions for years, until his behavior began to reverse on its own in his last few years.
In 1518, a small group of apparently ordinary people in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), became obsessed with dancing. They danced for months, even to the point of death, and the occurrence was dubbed the Dancing Plague of 1518. The motive for any of the dancing remains a mystery.
The incident started with one woman dancing on the street and quickly grew to include hundreds of people. The case's accounts, like others from the time period, are shaky and superstitious, leaving the number of victims and deaths (if any) unknown. Regardless, it is apparent that the incident occurred in some form and that there is no easy medical explanation for it to this day.
There was once a woman in Massachusetts (whose name has been changed) who lived a happy, normal life at the age of 37. She was well-liked and working on her Ph.D. at the time. She then began to have terrible hallucinations and paranoia, seemingly out of nowhere. Antipsychotic medications were ineffective. Nothing worked. Her celiac condition was discovered during one of her frequent doctor appointments, but by that time, her delusions had transformed her doctors into dark, scheming adversaries, and she paid them no mind.
She eventually sought out doctors again after hitting rock bottom, having lost her job, friends, and studies. They insisted she start eating gluten-free. Her symptoms were virtually completely gone after a few weeks. Furthermore, when the woman mistakenly ate gluten during her rehabilitation, her symptoms returned almost quickly, and she even attempted to murder her parents. Her symptoms disappeared once more when she returned to a gluten-free diet, this time in prison.
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the mechanism behind her account is still under investigation and is unlikely to yield a definitive explanation very soon.
Foreign accent syndrome can be caused by a variety of events, although the most common cause is a stroke. Following a stroke, victims begin speaking with an accent that is distinct from their own. It's frequently from a place they've never been or encountered before.
The extent to which their speech alters, as well as the apparent cause, differs. The acquired accent might come from any region, not just the one where the patient's native language is spoken. But one thing that all of these cases have in common is their unknown neural underpinnings and the degree to which the acquired accents, whether explainable or not, appear impossible.
"I was dead," Ruby Graupera-Cassimiro told ABC News after the incident. 'You were gray,' my spouse says. You were dead, and you were as cold as ice. 'You didn't have any color in your lips.' She was, in fact, dead for 45 minutes. She then elected to live again, ostensibly of her own free will.
After 45 minutes of legal dead, Graupera-Cassimiro came back to life, which is a miracle in and of itself. Furthermore, she managed to prevent any brain damage and even burns from the five times medics attempted to restart her heart.
Graupera-Cassimiro describes a religious experience with a spiritual person during her time under, and her miraculous recovery makes us not want to doubt it.
The cases of Phineas Gage and the celiac delusions ladies revealed how large biological alterations might lead to major psychological changes. The alterations, however, were dark and unsettling in both situations. Fortunately, the case of the Brazilian man known simply as Joo exists to show the inverse: after having a stroke, Joo developed a neurological addiction to philanthropy.
Joo abandoned his job as a human resources manager after the incident and started a street cart selling French fries. Perhaps sold isn't the proper term, because Joo was always giving fries away for free. When he finally accepted payment for them, he swiftly distributed the money to neighborhood beggars and children. He was so giving that he put his family in a position of relative poverty as a result of his generosity.
Joo was "pathologically generous—compulsively motivated to contribute," according to his physician. This neurological shift aided some and harmed others, but it remains largely unexplained in both cases.
This medical content merits its place at the top simply because it is a classic and a breath of fresh air after some weird twists and turns. Greg Thomas was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in his head and neck at the age of 56. Doctors advised him and his family to start making funeral arrangements.
Thomas began visiting a local church in his ostensibly dying days. He did, however, pray at its door every day, despite the fact that it was constantly shut and was growing progressively dilapidated. Thomas located the owners through word of mouth and requested that he be allowed to spend whatever time he had left renovating the church. In exchange, he only requested the ability to pray inside it.
His health deteriorated while he renovated the church and prayed. "My oncologist was blown away," Thomas recalls. 'Whatever you're doing, keep doing it,' she urged. Thomas' disease had gone into remission four years after his diagnosis, and the church appeared a century younger than it had before. "While I was rehabilitating the church, God was restoring me," Thomas says.