Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

photo by Robert McDon.

Because of our interest in all things bizarre in the medical world,  we spend a lot of time scouring the internet for news of the weird.  At the risk of being a bit controversial, we submit to you a condition we found via News of The World, a UK website.  In a 2007 article they tell us about Sarah, a then-24-year-old girl with a very strange medical condition.

She can’t stop having orgasms.

She has 100 to 200 orgasms per day.  She can’t use a hairdryer, ride in a car, or even be in a noisy room full of people because the vibrations send her into fits.  She has a condition called Persistent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), and before you start feeling jealous, imagine not being able to control when (or where) you reach your “happy place”.  She’s a beautician, and she has to deal with having all these orgasms every day right in front of people.  You can imagine, it’s pretty hard to get things done when your body is busy climaxing all the time.

PSAS is likely a nerve disorder, though not enough people have done studies on it to know for sure.  The condition is pretty rare.  It was only first documented in 2001.  It seems that most triggers are certain types of drugs.  For sure, Sarah’s symptoms didn’t start until she’d been on anti-depressants and then went off them.  Ever since then, she’s been suffering with this disorder.

Because the condition is thought to be nerve-related, physical therapy is one possible treatment.  Similarly, because the nerve disorder thought to cause PSAS is pundendal nerve entrapment, surgery is another option.  Surely there must be something that can help people like poor Sarah.  Too much of a good thing is still…too much.

Related articles

• Rare Medical Condition Causes Woman to Experience Dozens of Unwanted Orgasms Per Day [Anticlimactic]
• Nurse Diagnosed With Rare Condition, Persistent Genital Arousal Disorder Which Is Incurable
• Nurse has 100 orgasms a day due to a medical condition

Allergic to Water – An unfortunate allergy

photo by Tigerlily 09

Did you know there are some people out there who are allergic to water?  It’s true!  There are two conditions:  aquagenic urticaria and aquagenic pruritus – both of which are allergic reactions to water.

How is that possible?  How to people stay hydrated?  How do they bathe?  In aquagenic urticaria contact with water causes hives.  In aquagenic pruritus contact with water causes extreme prickliness and itchiness.  See, in the first one (let’s call it AU for short), the person is reacting to the ions in non-distilled water.  So in that case, you’re probably safe with distilled water.  Make sure it’s distilled, though, because the hives pop up and can last for hours.

In AP, unlike AU, the reaction is caused by a histamine.  (A histamine is what causes an inflammatory response in a person).    This is another one of those diseases that have been met with a lot of speculation.  People would feel this crazy itchiness and pain after contact with water, but there are no surface symptoms.  So, people wouldn’t believe that people were really feeling all this discomfort because of plain old water.

It’s a real condition, though, and people really suffer with it.  Sometimes people with this condition react to just moist air – so humidity is bad, right?  Some people find relief in applying heat to their skin directly after bathing, and for others that makes it worse.  Sometimes creams or allergy medicines (like Claritin) work, and sometimes it’s just no use – the water makes them itchy.

This is definitely up there in the “allergies we’re glad we don’t have” department, because we love water slides and bubble baths!

We’ve all seen it in movies or on TV – someone’s hand gets possessed and does all sorts of crazy things.  There was a movie about it – Idle Hands – where the protagonist with the antagonistic hand ends up killing a whole lot of people.  On an early episode of “Angel” Lindsey gets a new hand and it writes “kill, kill, kill” and all sorts of stuff.  One of my favorites is the scene from Evil Dead where Ash’s hand gets possessed.  Observe:

Fun, huh?  Anyway.  As it turns out, Alien Hand Syndrome is a real thing.  It’s certainly (at least I don’t think so) as extreme as poor Ash up there, but it’s still a tough thing to deal with.  It can be caused by a number of things – sometimes doctors will surgically separate the hemispheres of an epileptic’s brain – that can cause it.  It can also happen because of a brain injury.  Basically, the part of the brain that controls that appendage isn’t in cahoots with the rest of the brain that controls the rest of the body.  Hence the name “alien.”  It is simply not controlled by the conscious part of the mind.  Really makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Here is a video interview with a woman who suffers from alien hand syndrome.  The video isn’t as exciting as the one above, but it is still pretty interesting.

Related articles

• Top 10 Bizarre Science Experiments (toptenz.net)
• Your Brain Predicts Future Perceptions (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)