`He could’ve filled three Pepsi cans. Maybe three and a half.
That’s how much blood Talula estimates he lost the first time he tried to castrate himself.
Life had hit an all-time low. Depression hung around his shoulders like a lead suit. His libido had spiraled out of control, and he was masturbating as many as five times a day.
So in June 1994, at 37 years of age, Talula made a decision. He’d had enough. They had to go. He stripped naked and sat in his tub, Betadine solution in one hand, an Xacto knife in the other. He doused his genitals with the antiseptic until they glowed amber, then slowly, carefully, slit open his scrotum.
No anesthesia. No alcohol. Nothing.’
`Imagine if you discovered one day that two of your three children were genetically not yours. Recriminations, marital troubles, perhaps a divorce, right? Now add a twist. What if you were these children’s mother? Suddenly the question becomes not “Who?” but rather “Huh?”
Yet that’s what happened to “Jane”. At the age of 52 when her children were full-grown, she and her children underwent genetic testing for a possible kidney transplant. Completely unexpectedly, two of her three children tested as genetically not hers. A mix-up of babies was ruled out, and she and her husband had not undergone in vitro fertilization, so it was absolute that her children were hers.
Jane, it turns out, is a human Chimera.’
`A chiropractor who claims he can treat anyone by reaching back in time to when an injury occurred has attracted the attention of state regulators.
The Ohio State Chiropractic Board, in a notice of hearing, has accused James Burda of Athens of being “unable to practice chiropractic according to acceptable and prevailing standards of care due to mental illness, specifically, Delusional Disorder, Grandiose Type.”
Burda denied that he is mentally ill. He said he possesses a skill he discovered by accident while driving six years ago.’
`Karl is a double amputee, but not by accident, birth or disease. He is an amputee by choice.
Six years ago, Karl (who asked that his real name not be used) sat alone in a parked car with 100 pounds of dry ice and an obsession to destroy his legs.
“The first thing I did was I used a wooden flour scoop to scoop some granulated dry ice into the bucket. … It filled the wastebasket with carbon dioxide gas, which was 79 degrees below zero,” he said.
Over the next 45 minutes, Karl put his legs in the wastebasket and then kept adding dry ice until it got to the top. “I spent the next six hours well-packed in the dry ice, and then I’d add more dry ice to keep it topped off,” he said. A chemistry major in college, Karl had done his research well.
“I’d done all the thermodynamic calculations, the mass of tissue, how much heat you had to subtract from that tissue to achieve freezing temperatures,” he said. “And I knew that after six hours I had certainly achieved more than enough to freeze the full thickness.”‘
`A Swedish doctor who has previously been cautioned in Sweden for using a controversial ‘anal massage’ technique to cure various kinds of pain has been fired from his job in Norway – for the second time.
The man, who also runs a private clinic in Gothenburg, described his dismissal as part of a witch-hunt against him, and said that his technique is successful.
Several years ago, the man was warned by Sweden’s Medical Responsibility Board (HSAN) on at least three occasions, after treating an elderly woman’s headaches and back pain with his method. At the time he was working in the Stockholm area.’
`At least six men came to western North Carolina, some from as far away as South America, to have their genitals mutilated in what police described Friday as a sadomasochistic “dungeon.”
Three men have been charged with illegal castration in the case, Haywood County Sheriff Tom Alexander and District Attorney Michael Bonfoey said. The sheriff and prosecutor said the victims were willing participants in the procedures. [..]
Michael Mendez, 60, Richard Peter Sciara, 61, and Danny Carroll Reeves, 49, each are charged with castration without malice, maiming without malice and practicing medicine without a license.’
`Going to the hospital is rarely fun. If you weigh over 300 pounds like Beth Henk, it can be embarrassing.
“I’ve flipped an exam table — I sat on the end of it and it just flipped up,” said Henk, whose weight peaked at 745. When her son was born three years ago, “I had to sit in the hospital bed the whole time — the hospital’s rocker wouldn’t fit my butt.”
Today Henk helps Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis find better ways to deal with the growing number of very obese patients, an issue for many U.S. hospitals. Barnes-Jewish is replacing beds and wheelchairs with bigger models, widening doorways, buying larger CT scan machines, even replacing slippers and gowns.’
`Sufferers from depression who do not respond to existing treatments could soon benefit from a new procedure in which electrodes are inserted into the core of the brain and used to alter the patient’s mood.
Later this year, scientists at Bristol University will conduct the first trials of the so-called deep brain stimulation method on sufferers from depression. They will use hair-thin electrodes to stimulate two different parts of the brains of eight patients who suffer from an extreme form of recurrent unipolar depression – where mood only swings in one direction.
If the trials are successful, deep brain stimulation could be extended to the estimated 50,000 people in the UK who suffer from depression but cannot be helped by drugs or electroconvulsive therapy.’
`Having people pray for heart bypass patients had no effect on their recoveries in an American study, researchers say.
The scientists, led by Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School, emphasized that they looked only at the effect of prayer on the patients in their study – and could not address questions such as whether God exists or answers prayers.
The research, which is to be published in the April 2006 issue of the American Heart Journal, involved about 1,800 patients at six medical centres.’
`An ambulance company has responded to oversize needs in southern Nevada by providing an ambulance equipped to handle patients weighing 500 pounds or more.
“We’re getting more and more requests to transport larger patients every day,” said Roy Carroll, operations manager at American Medical Response, one of two companies with Clark County Fire Department contracts to provide medical transport in and around Las Vegas.
Crews have called 75 times in the last six months for additional manpower to handle morbidly obese patients, said Chris Piper, a western regional spokesman for Greenwood, Colo.-based AMR. He said the largest patients weighed more than 500 pounds.’
`uesday a Fenton chiropractor was charged with sexually assaulting his patients. Investigators say Dr. Robert Moore inappropriately touched three of his patients numerous times.
After taking a look at the evidence, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton has decided to charge Moore with 10 counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Moore walked into court with his wife on one arm and his bible in the other. He faced the judge, who charged him with 10 counts of 4th degree criminal sexual conduct. [..]
“He touched their breasts, saying he had to do it as part of the adjustment and in one instance he said he had to because their breasts were uneven and he had to do something about it,” Leyton said.’
`Many Americans are sleep-deprived zombies, and a quarter of us now use some form of sleeping pill or aid at night.
Wake up, says psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego. The pill-taking is real, but the refrain that Americans are sleep-deprived originates largely from people funded by the drug industry or with financial interests in sleep-research clinics.
“They think that scaring people about sleep increases their income,” Kripke told LiveScience.
Thanks to the marketing of less addictive drugs directly to consumers, sleeping pills have become a hot commodity, especially in the past five years.’
`H5N1 virus prefers to settle in cells deep within the lungs, rather than in the upper respiratory tract, as happens with human flu strains, two new studies have found.
H5N1 virus prefers to settle in cells deep within the lungs, rather than in the upper respiratory tract, as happens with human flu strains, two new studies have found.
That may help explain why human-to-human transmission of the bird flu virus has so far not happened — and might not happen in the future, Forbes.com reported Wednesday.
Since 2003, the H5N1 virus has been found in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of domestic fowl. While infection has primarily been limited to birds, the virus has killed 103 people via bird-to-human transmission.’
`Hundreds of well-off Japanese and other nationals are turning to China’s burgeoning human organ transplant industry, paying tens of thousands of pounds for livers and kidneys, which in some cases have been harvested from executed prisoners and sold to hospitals.
When Kenichiro Hokamura’s kidneys failed, he faced a choice: wait for a transplant or go online to check out rumours of organs for sale. As a native of Japan, where just 40 human organs for transplant have been donated since 1997, the businessman, 62, says it was no contest. “There are 100 people waiting in this prefecture alone. I would have died before getting a donor.” Still, he was astonished by just how easy it was.
Ten days after contacting a Japanese broker in China two months ago, he was lying on an operating table in a Shanghai hospital receiving a new kidney. “It was so fast, I was scared,” he says. The “e-donor” was an executed man; the price: 6.8m yen (about £33,000).’
Related to Witness Confirms Existence of Chinese Concentration Camp.
`The human death toll from the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu reached 103 after five people died from the disease in Azerbaijan, the World Health Organization said Tuesday. WHO said seven of 11 patients from Azerbaijan had tested positive for H5N1 in samples checked at a major laboratory in Britain. Five of those cases were fatal.
The sources of infection were still under investigation, but officials suspected a connection to the feathers of dead swans.’
`An Israeli court sentenced a man to two years in prison on Sunday for operating a fake clinic that offered penis enhancements and so-called medical treatments to make people taller, which failed to work.
Simon Sofer told dozens of clients he was a doctor and said he could add up to 3.9 inches to their height or 2.4 inches to their genitals, the Tel Aviv court said.
His clinic, in operation since 1999, was not medically supervised, a government prosecutor had told the court.’
`A macabre scandal in which corpses were plundered for body parts could be even bigger than previously disclosed, with one company alone saying it has distributed thousands of pieces of human tissue that authorities fear could be tainted with disease.
In addition, three other companies have reported quarantining or destroying more than $5 million in tissue from Biomedical Tissue Services — the now-defunct New Jersey supply house at the center of the scandal.
While the exact number of pieces distributed and used in operations has not been revealed, hospitals in recent weeks have spoken of contacting hundreds of patients who may have received tainted tissue.’
`Silvestre, who posed as a general surgeon, performed operations on the women who went to see him for breast augmentations, but were grossly disfigured and instead had to see licensed doctors to try and repair the damage.
Champion bodybuilder and former Mr. Mexico Alexander Baez also went to Silvestre’s Ocean Health Center in Miami Beach to have his pectoral muscles enhanced. But he woke up to find he had been given female breast implants.
Baez’s attorney said veterinary anesthesia was used on his client, who woke up three times during the procedure.’
`Medical experts have been baffled by what causes asthma. Most of them favor the idea that it stems from “helper” cells that have gone awry. But researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS) have come up with convincing evidence that the answer lies in a special type of natural “killer” cell.
“We were very, very surprised,” admits Dale Umetsu, a professor of pediatrics at the Medical School and at Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital in Boston. “People have been confused about which cells in the lungs are responsible for all these years. Now, we have to rethink the results of so many studies. Our new findings were totally unexpected.”‘
`Want to buy a head? On the American body-part market, the going price is between $500 and $900, plus another $50 if you’d like the brain, too. A torso will set you back as much as $3,000, while a single foot could cost $650.
At these prices, there’s plenty of temptation for people to take advantage of the dead. But as a disturbing new book reveals, the burgeoning trade in human remains is largely unmonitored. Universities, mortuaries and medical companies routinely buy and sell arms, legs and elbows with virtually no oversight.
The inevitable result? Crooked deals, stolen corpses and lots of looking the other way.’
`Detective Danny Johnson was on patrol outside Tampa, Florida, when a report came through of a possible shooting in a junkyard three blocks away. Arriving on the scene, he found an elderly man sitting on a tractor, with a large hole in his leg that was bleeding profusely.
Realising it would be some time before the ambulance arrived, Johnson opened a packet of sand-like material and poured it into the wound. Within seconds the bleeding had practically stopped, and the man survived. “The medic told me that had I not put the substance in there, the guy would probably have bled out and died,” he says.
The material, called QuikClot, which is issued routinely to police officers in Hillsborough county, Florida, was developed for the US military to cut down the number of soldiers who bleed to death on the battlefield. [..]’
`Sweden recorded its first case of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain on Wednesday, saying European laboratory tests confirm two wild birds found dead in the southeast were infected with the virus. Afghan authorities, meanwhile, said preliminary test results from a U.N. lab left them “99 percent certain” that the country’s first bird flu outbreak was the deadly H5N1 strain.
Danish authorities said they too had found a wild bird infected with an aggressive strain of bird flu, but it was not immediately whether it was the deadly H5N1 strain. If confirmed as H5N1, it would be the first case of the virus in Denmark.
Also Wednesday, Myanmar announced it had culled 5,000 poultry to prevent the spread of bird flu, as authorities in western India prepared to slaughter tens of thousands of chickens.’
`Two men remain critically ill and four others are in a serious condition after suffering a violent reaction while taking part in a clinical drugs trial. [..]
As there was no antidote and doctors did not know what had happened, they were having to treat the patients on a “symptomatic basis”, [a lawyer] said. [..]
Ms Marshall, 35, whose boyfriend is critically ill, said the normally healthy 28-year-old’s face was so puffed, he “looks like the Elephant Man”.’
`Claude Archambault says his client threw out the cup and should get the “Roll up the Rim” prize that is being fought over by two Montreal families.
Last week, a 10-year-old girl found the unrolled cup in a garbage can in her school. She enlisted the help of a 12-year-old friend to roll up the cup’s rim. They discovered the cup was the winner of a $28,700 Toyota RAV 4.
Since then, their families have been bickering over who should get the prize.
The Quebec government agency that regulates contests said the whole thing seems to be spinning out of control.’
`Regardless of who deserves the most credit in its invention, before the incandescent bulb began to proliferate in the early twentieth century, human sleep schedules were largely governed by the Earth’s day and night cycle. But once humans possessed the technology to ward off an appreciable chunk of nighttime, we soon extended our usable waking hours by an average of 13%. Some researchers believe that this modern convenience, credited with bringing the human race in from the dark, may also be responsible for numerous ills. [..]
Once humans began to use artificial light to vary the length of the day, the average night’s sleep decreased from about nine hours to about seven, and the amount of sleep began to vary considerably from one night to the next. This irregularity prevents one’s circadian rhythm from settling into a pattern, and creates a state of perpetual semi-jet-lag. Our bodies’ rhythms attempt to appropriately adjust our alertness, blood pressure, and such for particular times of day; but we often do things contrary to this cycle, and therein lies the problem.’
`Death cult guru Shoko Asahara is merely trying to pull the wool over authorities’ eyes to avoid the death sentence against him from being carried out, psychiatrists claimed in a report filed to the Tokyo High Court last month to determine whether he is mentally fit to stand trial. Friday (3/17), however, says what the swami’s actually pulling is something entirely different. [..]
“He took off his trousers and diapers, exposed his genitalia and masturbated. He repeated the same action frequently. Whenever he acts like that, he drops his trousers, his diaper and diaper cover to his knees, finishes the act, then raises his trousers up to his waist again,” Friday quotes the Nishiyama Report as saying.
The weekly goes on to note that Asahara does not restrain his self-ministrations to times when he’s alone in his cell at the Tokyo Detention Center.’
`NSW health officials are investigating an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease after two women were hospitalised with symptoms of the killer bacteria.
The two women, one aged in her 50s and the other in her 70s, were admitted to Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital sometime last week after visiting Chatswood’s shopping area.
Doctors on Friday confirmed they had contracted an infection of the lungs caused by the bacteria of the Legionella family.’
`A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at CEBIT in Germany. As we have speculated here, rapid advances in cybernetics are now ocurring, which will eventually change how consumers interface with computers, while the substructure of how people inter-relate online has continued to evolve quickly. Imagine reaction time that is constrained only by the power and speed of thought without any mechanical components. It would seem we are headed towards an always-connected global brain. With complete integration of components, what is the difference between telepathy and let’s say, a WiFi/Bluetooth connection between your computer and your brain, with the computer/device acting as a filter and transceiver?’
`A mouse immune cell that plays dual roles as both assassin and messenger, normally the job of two separate cells, has been discovered by an international team of researchers. The discovery has triggered a race among scientists to find a human equivalent of the multitasking cell, which could one day be a target for therapies that seek out and destroy cancer.
“In the same way that intelligence and law enforcement agencies can face deadly threats together instead of separately, this one cell combines the ability to kill foreign pathogens and distribute information about that experience,” says Drew Pardoll, M.D., Ph.D., the Seraph Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.’
