A new study recently revealed that some Swiss hospitals still rely on a medieval prayer known as ‘The Secret’ to protect patients from excessive bleeding after surgeries.

We live in a time when medical professionals have access to a variety of scientifically-proven tools to prevent excessive bleeding in patients, but according to data presented in a recent study, several hospitals in Switzerland still rely on a “healing formula” dating back to the Middle Ages to keep people from bleeding to death. Known as The Secret, this “blood charm is widely practiced in the French-speaking part of Switzerland,” and reportedly works by mobilizing “superior forces to help cure the patient”. The Secret was recently the subject of a study designed to test the efficacy of the ritual.

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Ever wish you had the deep voice of James Earl Jones? Well, maybe that’s an unattainable goal, but if you’re willing to go under the knife for a deeper or higher voice, there’s a surgeon in Turkey who can help.

Dr Kursat Yelken has been performing voice deepening surgeries for 15 years and claims that demand for the procedure has been increasing. He currently operates on 100 – 150 people a year, from executives wanting to sound more assertive, to transgender people looking to make their voice match their new gender. The Turkish doctor, who trained at Harvard Medical School, can tweak patients’ pitch and tone, giving them a deeper or higher voice, depending on their preferences.

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Surgeons at a hospital in Lithuania spent over three hours saving the life of a man who, for some reason, had swallowed more than a kilogram of metallic objects over the last month.

Lithuanian media recently reported the shocking case of a man who arrived at the Klaipėda University Hospital in the Baltic port of Klaipeda complaining of severe abdominal pain but conveniently failed to mention that he had swallows over a kilogram of metal objects over the last 30 days. An X-ray examination revealed that the man’s stomach was full of metal objects of all shapes and sizes, including nails, screws, and blades. They prepped the man, whose identity has not been revealed, for emergency surgery and spent over 3 hours removing the metal objects.

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A 31-year-old Chinese woman who had recently undergone a rhinoplasty procedure at a hospital in Chengdu, was shocked to see that a chunk of her ear cartilage had been removed, allegedly without her consent.

The woman, identified only as Ms. Zhao, had her nose surgery at the Angel Wing Hospital in Chengdu on September 1st. This was her second such procedure in the last five years, but the first one in which part of her ear disappeared… Zhao told Chinese media that the operation went fine, she felt good, but four days later she looked in the mirror and noticed something strange about her right ear. The tragus, that small, pointy cartilage on the inside of the inner side of the ear, had obviously been surgically removed, only no one had informed her about it.

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A 76-year-old man from rural China can consider himself lucky to be alive after he had a four-inch-long rusty knife surgically removed from his brain, 26 years after being stabbed in the head.

The case of Duorijie, an old farmer from the rural county of Haiyan in China’s north-western Qinghai Province, can be considered nothing short of a miracle. Stabbed in the head in 1994, during a violent mugging, Duorijie had reportedly been living with a long knife blade stuck in his brain ever since. Lucky to have survived the attack, the farmer had been experiencing all kinds of troublesome symptoms because of the knife blade in his brain, like lost vision in his right eye and chronic headaches. Now, thanks to a team of doctors, he is finally able to enjoy a pain-free life.

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A Las Vegas limb-lengthening clinic has been getting a lot of attention online this week for offering people the chance to add a few inches to their stature through minimally invasive surgery.

The LimbPlastX Institute charges up to $75,000 to add up to six inches to patients’ height, a hefty price that many are more than willing to pay to overcome their height complex. Dr Kevin Debiparshad, a consultant at the clinic, said that 30 men sign up for the life-changing procedure in 2019 alone, with even more procedures lined up for 2020, especially after the recent media exposure. The procedure surprisingly lasts only 1.5 hours and involves incisions into the leg bones and the insertion of a special stretching device. The full results are only visible after about a year.

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Instead of testing potential interns’ surgery skills on real patients, a Japanese hospital devised an innovative examination process that involves miniature origami and sushi!

The Kurashiki Central Hospital, in southern Japan offers one of the best surgical internship programs in the country, but medical students who want to secure a position here have to prove their skills in a series of bizarre hand-on challenges. First, they have to use surgical instruments to fold a piece of paper into an origami crane. That sounds easy enough for someone with a bit of experience in creating origami, but did I mention the piece of paper measures only 1.5 square centimeters?

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