Follow Up: Death By a Thousand Cuts

I recently came across a Straight Dope article on the practice of lingchi, or "Death by a Thousand Cuts," in China.  He confirms that yes, it was a method of corporal punishment until 1905, though the practice of having slips of paper with the body part to be hacked off drawn/written on them can only be traced back to one source.  You can read more here: Did the Chinese really practice death by a thousand cuts?

HOLY CRAP MAGGOTS

WTF, a poor old lady with Alzheimer's was found to have 57 freaking maggots in her ear!

Now, I'd like to back up and talk a little bit about how I find stories to blog about on here.  I check the "weird" or "oddball" section of a lot of news and news aggregate sites, like Reddit and Digg and Huffpo.  I sort through the funny pictures that make up the majority of the posts and try to find the truly horrible somethings that have happened.  A lot of times, I find stories that immediately grab my attention, like this one.  "57 maggots discovered in ear of Alzheimer's patient while she was under care of $10,000-a-month nursing home," you say?  I am all ears! (Get it?)  Then I see the source, though.  Daily Mail.  And it's almost always Daily Mail.  For those of you who don't know, the Daily Mail is a British tabloid.  So I try not to post stuff from the Daily Mail, just like I don't post an article about some lady giving birth to Bat Boy from the National Enquirer.  So I was just about to write this thing off... but first I had to read it... and sure enough, they had an actual source for the piece.

CBS Chicago (click for video) reports that 92-year-old Catherine McCann was discovered to have her ear infested with maggots.  She has severe Alzheimer's and is unable to speak, so the only sign that something was wrong was that she kept tugging at her ear.  From the size of the maggots, it is estimated that the maggots were there 2 1/2 to 3 days. 

She was being cared for at an expensive nursing home which is, understandably, getting its pants sued off right about now.

Woman grows nails instead of hair

A young woman in Memphis, Shanyna Isom, began producing nails instead of hair after an allergic reaction to steroids back in 2009.  This doesn't only affect the hair on her head, but the hair all over her body.  As such, she now needs others to help her move around and even with 25 different medications to help control the condition, can only walk with a cane.  She has consulted doctors all over the country and even one in the Netherlands, but none of them have been able to diagnose her.  It is a true medical mystery.

Source: WMC-TV

More pictures and a video can be found at the WMC-TV news site.

Learn how you can help at the SAI Foundation, founded in order to help Shanyna with her medical bills, as well as others with undiagnosable illnesses.

Review: When Surgical Tools Get Left Behind I & II

Tonight on the Discovery Health channel I watched When Surgical Tools Get Left Behind, parts I and II.  Objects left in a patient after surgery is a major problem, as about 1,500 people in the U.S. alone learn first hand every year (source). There is even a national safety project devoted to preventing retained surgical objects, No Thing Left Behind, which details safety procedures such as "Sponge Accounting" (apparently two thirds of the objects left behind are sponges, called gossypiboma; the sponges are tiny little gauze things that look like tissue once they're soaked with blood).   These objects can cause severe complications down the road, including pain and infection, and when the body encapsulates the object in tissue, they can be mistaken for tumors.

Among the retained objects featured in the show were a retractor (a metal object about the size and shape of a ruler), sponges and gauze, a plastic tube (left shoved down a kid's throat!) and a 9-inch clamp.  In one case the object caused an infection by flesh-eating bacteria (which was cured by packing the wound with bleach-soaked gauze) and another caused gangrene of the ribs. Other common side effects were depression, PTSD, and painkiller addiction.

Overall, the show was pretty mediocre, with the sequel being slightly better than the first.  It was fairly informative-- it explained the procedure of counting surgical equipment before and after an operation, and showed a new way of using barcodes to do so.  It also gave a lot of good background information about the likelihood and risk factors for having a tool left behind.  But many of the cases ran into each other after the first twenty minutes.  I found myself wishing they featured more large objects, or else a wider variety of objects (which the second did, I suppose).  Even though sponges were the most common, and could cause just as terrible complications, they got a bit old to watch.  I would definitely still recommend it if nothing else was on, but I wish I'd watched Doctor Who instead.

Overall: 2.5/5 skulls

Phantom limb pain

A phantom limb is one of the more strangely horrifying side-effects of surgery.  A phantom limb is the sensation that an amputated (or otherwise missing) limb/other appendage is still attached to one's body.  But often the phantom limb feels tense or painful.  What can you do about pain in a limb that isn't there?  What else can go wrong in that limb?

A woman who was born with only three fingers on her right hand, which was later amputated, found out in a strange way.  Well, something didn't go wrong, exactly.  It's more like something went freakishly right.  Her two missing fingers "grew back" on her phantom limb after the real one was amputated, which shows something about how our brain recognizes what we "should" have in/on our body.  Her new fingers came back shorter, but a mirror box was used to lengthen them.

The article did not mention any pain in her phantom hand.

Religion makes people do horrible things, pt. 2

Did you hear about the Islamic cult living underground in Kazan, Tatarstan (part of the Russian Federation)?  Some of the children had apparently never seen sunlight.  It makes you think of that Ray Bradbury story.  You know the one.  I'd like to add that Kazan is not some podunk little bizarre Russian village.  It's got over a million people, so likely it's bigger than where you are living now.  And it's a pretty normal city.  I know people from there, and people who have been there.  They are all normal, sunlight-loving people.  (Well, most of them are, anyway.)

Well, I guess some of the story was quite exaggerated, particularly the state of the cells.  However, they were without any sort of power, water, or central heat.  The follow-up articles do not address whether some children never saw sunlight, only that some rooms indeed had windows.  I consider the jury still out on this one-- I think the headline calling it a lie was a bit exaggerated itself.

Torture Week: Death by a Thousand Cuts

Today we travel to ancient (and not-so-ancient, up to the early 1900s in fact) China to learn about Língchí, also known as Slow Slicing or the Death by a Thousand Cuts.  This method was used as punishment for only the most heinous of crimes, like treason or patricide (both of which violated the traditional order of filial piety).  In this method of torture, the victim was restrained in public, then multiple small (and not so small-- fingers, limbs, and... other appendages were often cut off, and eyes were often put out first thing, to amp up the psychological terror) cuts were made, until finally the victim either was beheaded or got a knife to the heart and died.

From The Big Book of Pain

 

 

There is some controversy over just how horrible this method was, however.  According to my Big Book of Pain, there were symbols on the knives used indicating which body part was to be cut.  Either the victim's family bribed the executioner to choose the "heart" knife very quickly, or else the victim just hoped for it really hard.  But Wikipedia states that usually the victim was already dead before the slicing started.  The real punishment here was that being all cut up violated the aforementioned filial piety thing-- you didn't want to show up to the afterlife in pieces.  In addition, it states that opium was often given to the victim-- but there is no consensus over whether this was an act of mercy (I've heard things don't hurt as much on opium) or further torture (you would be less likely to pass out from shock).