Woman Accidently Inhales Condom

Apparently, this actually happened to a woman in India. I have a hard time believing it, but hey, odder things have occurred. If the doctor made his prognosis, who am I to argue with it?

A 27-year-old lady presented with persistent cough, sputum and fever for the preceding six months. Inspite of trials with antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis treatment for the preceeding four months, her symptoms did not improve. A subsequent chest radiograph showed non-homogeneous collapse-consolidation of right upper lobe. Videobronchoscopy revealed an inverted bag like structure in right upper lobe bronchus and rigid bronchoscopic removal with biopsy forceps confirmed the presence of a condom. Detailed retrospective history also confirmed accidental inhalation of the condom during fellatio.

Accidental condom inhalation. [Indian J Chest Dis Allied Sci. 2004 Jan-Mar] - PubMed Result

I'm going to ask what many of you are undoubtedly thinking. How the hell do you forget inhaling a condom? How can you show up at the doctor's office after that event and say, "I've got this terrible infection and I just don't know how I got it?" I mean, isn't inhaling a condom a guaranteed memorable event?

Don't even get me started on how it happened. She must have been so bloody enthusiastic that she neglected to notice the condom slipping off. Even more shocking is that she didn't swallow, she inhaled. Clearly, this is a woman who gives blowjobs like they're going out of business.

Now all you alpha males out there who are planning on tracking down this woman to get her to repeat this performance, please don't. She's been through enough. You'll kill her. You don't need that hanging over your head.

Woman Wins Right to Eat Her Placenta

It amazes me how susceptible people are to quack medicine. While present-day medicine is by no means perfect, it is still massively more dependendable than many "folk" solutions. This isn't to say that naturopathy is not effective. It is to say, though, that a medical doctor is more authoritative on medical matters than some random hippie.

Indeed, if you start ignoring medical science you could end up like this woman spent who massive amounts of time and money so she could obtain her placenta.

A woman has won a court fight to keep the placenta after her daughter's birth. She had planned to grind it up and ingest it as a way to fight postpartum depression, but now plans to bury it...

Swanson, who was 30 when she gave birth, originally wanted to give her placenta to a friend to be dried, ground into a powder and packed into capsules. She said she now plans to dry, store and eventually bury the organ instead of eating it.

"I hope this brings about a better awareness about the benefits of placenta," she said, citing a theory that placental hormones can help control postpartum blues.

Mother Wins Fight to Retrieve Placenta

Here I must disagree with SFGate's use of the word "theory". A theory is a reputable explanation for natural seen phenomena. I have yet to hear from a respected medical doctor who believes ingesting placenta will relieve women of post-partem depression.

Actually, I think this mother is acting quite irresponsibly. Placenta, as the article notes, is "human biohazardous waste". That means getting her friend to ingest her placenta is probably the wrong thing to do.

In the woman's defense, she has decided to bury it. Still, no credence should be given to this quackery. The fact that she sought to use this court case as a means to "raise awareness" of her silly ideas only proves she's learned nothing.

To this, I say if she really wants to make a case for placenta-ingesting, and it really is so important that she'll make noise in the courts, maybe she should spend her time at medical school and write a peer-reviewed doctoral thesis on it. That is unlikely, though.

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Scientists Have Resurrected 5 Million-Year-Old Virus

This is kind of like Jurassic Park, only with virii instead of dinosaurs. There are definitely some "What if?" questions circulating around my head right now. For instance, even though this virus may be 1,000 times less infectious than HIV, how infectious would this virus be if it got out of the labs? Certainly, it was infectious enough to have left traces of itself in our genome — despite being "extinct" for thousands of years.

The ancestral virus was able to copy itself and manufacture new virus particles, they found. And these particles could infect fresh cells and copy and paste its genes into these cells' genome.

The study suggests that cells acquired numerous copies of this ancestral retrovirus by the same cyclical process: the retrovirus manufactured new particles that escaped one cell and infected eggs and sperm again and again. This may have still been happening just a few hundred thousand years ago.

news @ nature.com - Ancient human virus resurrected - Virus from distant past may throw light on role of retroviruses in cancer.

Yet there is an obvious benefit towards resurrecting this virus. It may shed light on cancer and how to treat it. If we can understand how the DNA this virus contributed to our genome contributes to cancer, some forms of cancer may soon become treatable. Seeing how one out of every seven people die from cancer, this could be a boon to medical science.

Still, what a bet to make. Create the possibility an obsolete virus could be released out of the lab. Or refuse to research a cancer-causing factor due to the chance the virus could expose itself to the public. For now, I think I'll take the first option.

Medieval Anatomical Sculpture

Dream Anatomy is a US government website documenting the history of medicine. There documentation of medicine consists largely of medical drawings throughout history. While the history of medicine is in and of itself fascinating, what is also interesting is that the history of medical drawings is also the history of artistic realism. Of course, the function of medicine is to accurately cure ailments. For this reason, all artful renderings of the human body must be realistic.

Now consider the above sculpture.

These manikins, between 6 to 7 inches in length, were made from solid pieces of ivory. The arms were carved separately and are moveable. The thoracic and abdominal walls can be removed, revealing the viscera. In some manikins the internal organs are carved in the original block and are not removable, while they are formed into separate pieces that can be removed.

Dream Anatomy: Gallery: Anatomical Manikin 3

If you click on the thumbnail above, you will discover little people operating the internal organs. That was the science of the day, not some piece of fantasy. Isn't that amazing?

500 years into the future, I wonder what others will laugh at as being fanciful from our era.