Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

As a follow-up to my last post about art implants and body modification, I submit to you the bagel forehead – a craze sweeping the trendier clubs in Japan.

There is one encouraging thing about this practice.  If you don’t like it, at least it’s not permanent.  It is, however, probably painful.  The bulges like the ones you see above are created by the insertion of a needle under the skin through which saline drips to create the bump.  Once the selected part is inflated, the person who has been inflated can poke and prod the bulbous part.  A popular look is to press a dent into the center, creating the bagel look.

People choose all different types of body parts to inflate, but the forehead is popular because it is so obvious.  One drawback is that frequent inflation of one’s forehead can lead to a saggy forehead.  The skin can get stretched permanently.

But hey, there’s always Botox, right?

So, like I’ve said before, I’m totally obsessed with this show on The History Channel called Stan Lee’s Superhumans.  On the very first episode, they featured this guy named Gino Martino (actually his name is John Ferraro) who can break stuff over his head.  And not just boards and stuff like that.  Try steel beams.  Check this out:

How, oh how, is this possible?  The beams aren’t fake, that’s one thing.  And this guy’s amazing head-butt powers are further examined on the History Channel show.  He breaks a cinderblock by placing the cinderblock on his head and having someone drop a BOWLING BALL on it. He breaks another cinderblock by having someone hit it with a sledgehammer.  Most of these activities would kill someone, or at least seriously scramble their brains, but Gino/John is able to do this with little side effects.  No, it’s not super easy for him, but he can shake it off pretty quickly.

SPOILER ALERT!

So, after doing the tests and things on this guy, the show’s scientists or doctors or whatever discovered that this guy’s skull is, like, 14.5 mm thick.  The average man’s skull is about 6.5 mm thick, which means that Dudester here has a skull that is over twice as thick as an average skull.  How completely cool is that?

Unfortunately for Gino/John, his SKIN isn’t super thick, so when he does things like breaking metal over his head, or hammering a big nail into a board with his forehead, he still gets a little bloody.

But despite his tendency to get all gory, John Ferraro is actually sort of a superhuman.  He has a super thick skull, which makes this self-proclaimed “Head Butt King” exceptional.  Stan Lee named him “The Human Anvil,” and we’re all sort of hoping he gets his own book, right?

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