A 63-year-old Vietnamese woman who recently underwent a laparoscopic procedure to have a tumour from her throat removed was shocked to hear that the doctors removed a six-inch leech from her throat instead. The parasite had reportedly been living in the woman’s throat for about three months.

The unnamed woman from Vietnam’s mountainous Ha Giang Province had been complaining about severe headaches, frequent nasal congestion and a constant sensation of mucous fluid flowing down the throat, for several weeks. She eventually checked into a local hospital where ENT (ear nose and throat) specialists performed various tests and discovered an unidentified mass in her throat. The woman was scheduled for laparoscopic surgery to have the mass – believed to be a tumour – removed, but during the procedure, doctors were shocked to find a live leech attached to the woman’s throat.

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A Chinese woman recently made the news after being diagnosed with a very rare form of hearing loss which leaves sufferers unable to hear low frequency sounds, like men’s voices.

The woman from Xiamen, on China’s east coast, knew something was wrong when she woke up one morning and realized that she couldn’t hear anything her boyfriend said. She had been suffering from nausea and ringing in her ears the night before, but figured that a good night sleep would make everything better, so she went to bed. But when she woke up the next morning, she was shocked by the realization that she couldn’t hear a word the man beside her was saying. The woman, known only as Ms. Chen, was rushed to a local hospital where an ear, nose and throat specialist diagnosed her with a rare condition known as reverse-slope hearing loss.

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Blood transfusions have been used to save lives for decades, but now one startup wants to use the medical procedure to combat the effects of aging by injecting older people with young blood. The treatment is called “Ambrosia”, after the mythological food of the Greek gods, which granted whoever consumed it longevity or immortality.

It only takes two hours to have two liters of plasma from donors aged 16 to 25 into your body, but according to Ambrosia founder Jesse Karmazin, the results are nothing-short of miraculous. He once called it “plastic surgery from the inside out“, told one reporter that while the transfusion doesn’t grant immortality, it “comes pretty close”, and told another journalist that just one infusion of young blood “dramatically improves people’s appearance, their memory and their strength”. The company even ran a medical study that officially ended in January of 2018, but despite boasting about its “really positive” results, Ambrosia Medical has yet to make those results public. And that’s what makes this treatment so controversial in the eyes of many health experts – no one has ever offered any solid proof of its efficacy.

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Australian celebrity chef and Instagram wellness guru Pete Evans has come under fire for saying that “sungazing”, the act of looking directly at the sun, is a one of the best forms of free medicine.

“Every day I love to immerse myself in an experience within the cleansing ocean water as well as a brief gaze into the radiant light of the early rising or late setting sun,” Evans posted on Instagram. “These simple, yet powerful practices have got to be two of the best forms of free medicine on the planet for body, mind and spirit.”

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Doctors at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin have been stunned by the unexpected recovery of an 11-year-old girl whose inoperable brain tumor miraculously disappeared.

Earlier this year, Roxli Doss was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a rare and extremely aggressive brain tumor with a very low survival rate. It was well-incorporated into her brain stem, making it impossible to remove surgically, so the doctors told the girld’s parents to make the most of the time they had left with her. However, they also decided to try radiation therapy, as it had been shown to extend a patient’s life by three to six months. Radiation isn’t a cure; in fact DIPG is an incurable condition , so therefore the diagnostic is considered terminal. But in Roxli’s case, the treatment literally worked wonders. After six weeks of radiation, an MRI showed almost no signs that the tumor ever existed.

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It turns out that smelling your own socks is not only gross but potentially deadly. A Chinese man was recently hospitalized with a severe pulmonary fungal infection, which he allegedly developed by constantly sniffing his used socks.

When he was brought in to the No 909 Hospital in Zhangzhou, China’s Fujian Province, the 37-year-old man, surnamed Peng, complained of chest pain and frequent coughing. An X-ray showed that he was suffering from a severe lung infection, and subsequent tests revealed that it had been caused by a bacteria typically found in used footwear. After being questioned by his doctors, Peng admitted that he had long developed a habit of sniffing his dirty socks every day after coming home from work, before throwing them in the laundry basket.

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A Colorado man claims that he was on intense chemotherapy and painkillers for five long years, after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer by multiple doctors, a cancer that he recently learned never existed.

The living nightmare of James Salaz, a resident of Montrose, in Colorado, began five years ago, when he went to a hospital to have an intense pain deep under his armpit investigated. His doctor told him that tests revealed two abnormalities inside his left lung. After undergoing a couple of open lung biopsies, Salaz was diagnosed with Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis, a rare form of cancer that causes cells to build up in parts of the body, damaging tissues and ultimately leading to death. Devastated by the news, he visited doctors in Montrose, Delta, Grand Junction and Denver, and they all confirmed that he had Langerhans. It turns out they were all wrong.

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A California man’s unexpected recovery has left doctor’s baffled. A day before his scheduled surgery to have a presumed brain tumor removed, a final head CT exam showed that the mass in his brain had miraculously disappeared.

Paul Wood, a resident of Lodi, in California, started complaining of excruciating headaches and dizziness several months ago, and received several serious diagnoses from doctors. A neurosurgeon at UC San Francisco told him that he had a brain bleeding, while a radiologist told him that his CAT scans showed a brain tumor. Both required risky brain surgery, but a day before the scheduled intervention to have the suspected tumor removed, a fresh CT scan revealed no sign of anything unusual in his brain. Doctors couldn’t, and still cannot explain what happened, but Wood is convinced that it’s nothing short of a miracle from God.

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A Chinese woman recently found herself unable to use the fingers on her right hand after spending her entire week-long vacation playing video games on her smartphone.

The unnamed woman from Changsha, in China’s Hunan province, reportedly took a week off from work and spent all that time playing on her smartphone. According to a Pear video documenting her bizarre case, the only time she put down her phone was when she slept. After a few days, she started experiencing severe pain her right hand, but she kept playing until her fingers became stuck in smartphone-holding position and she found herself unable to flex them at all.

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An extraordinary and terrifying medical case revealed in the July issue of the American Journal of Transplantation proves that organ transplants can pass not only certain infectious diseases to recipients, but in rare cases, also cancer.

Patients known to have malignant tumors are often not able to donate their organs, but that was not the case of a 53-year-old woman who died of a stoke in 2007. She had no known conditions that could prevent doctors from transplanting her organs, and repeated tests revealed no sign of cancer. The woman’s kidneys, lungs, liver and heart were transplanted into donor recipients, but instead of saving their lives, they infected four of the five recipients with cancer, while the fifth died of unrelated causes shortly after the transplant.

The four organ recipients had recovered well after the transplants, but 16 months later, the woman who had received the donor’s lung fell ill and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer in the lymph nodes in her chest. Unfortunately, we live in an age when someone is diagnosed with cancer every couple of minutes, but what made this case remarkable was that tests showed the cancerous cells were actually breast cancer cells. Further DNA analysis revealed that they had come from the organ donor.

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A Chinese man recently had an inch-long leech yanked out of his nose after hatching and living there for at least three months.

The man, surnamed Pan, went to Dongguan Chang’an Hospital, in China’s Guangdong province, after experiencing constant nose bleeds for 10 days. Liu Yuxing, an ear, nose and throat doctor at the hospital, immediately suspected that a leech was the. He had never once found one in a patient’s nose, but had read about similar cases in medical journals. It turned out that his hunch was right, as an endoscopic investigation revealed a bloodsucker firmly attached to the man’s nostril.

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Despite the amazing scientific advances we have made in the last century, there are still many medical cases that can’t be fully explained. Vanishing Bones Syndrome sounds like something straight out of an episode of House MD, but doctors at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Scotland encountered a case of this bizarre condition in a 44-year-old woman.

Also known as Gorham-Stout disease, this extremely rare condition causes the sufferer to experience progressive bone loss. The disease is so uncommon that there has only ever been 64 recorded cases in medical literature since it was first described in 1838. In a healthy person, bones are constantly rebuilding themselves to help maintain their strength, and Gorham-Stout disease is believed to be a malfunction of this process; the bone breaks itself down faster than it can repair itself.

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In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children are reportedly suffering from a strange condition known as “resignation syndrome”. These children fall into a coma-like state; they don’t eat, speak, or even open their eyes. Sufferers of resignation syndrome are often left bedbound for years at a time.

Their appearances suggest they have been involved in some sort of accident or suffer from some sort of neurological illness, but sufferers of resignation syndrome have nothing physically wrong with them—they have simply lost the will to live. The condition is known as “uppgivenhetssyndrom” in Sweden, and it is thought to only affect young members of the refugee population.

Research has linked resignation syndrome with the stress and disappointment of having asylum claims rejected. In recent years, regulations surrounding asylum cases have tightened, and those refugees who were not fleeing from an active war zone were likely to have their applications rejected. These rejections could often take years to be decided upon, leaving refugee families in a state of limbo. For many children, the weight of rejection proved too much to bear and they would shut down completely, entering a coma-like state, seemingly on the edge between life and death.

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25-year-old Tomasz Nadolski, from Wroclaw, Poland,  suffers from a rare and cruel disease that has not only made his life a living hell, but also left him stuck in the underdeveloped body of a 12-year-old boy.

Tomasz’s health problems began when he was only 7-years-old. He would throw up after every meal and experience excruciating pain in his stomach, hands and feet. Because he couldn’t keep any food down, he lost a lot of weight and kids at school started teasing him about looking like a walking skeleton. For years, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, and some of them even claimed that his problems were mental rather than physical. It took 16 years for Tomasz’s condition to finally be diagnosed, but, unfortunately, knowing what he was suffering from didn’t make the young man’s life any better.

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A 42-year old woman who thought her contact lens had fallen off when she was hit in the eye with a shuttlecock 28 years ago recently discovered that it had actually been lodged in her eyelid all this time.

Those of us who no longer have perfect vision understand just how amazing and convenient contact lenses can be, especially when it comes to an active lifestyle. But in some cases, instead of making our lives easier, they can cause annoyances. In very rare cases, those annoyances go beyond dry eyes or eye infections—they can actually become embedded in your eyelid, all without you knowing it.

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