Oh, the thrills and fears of being a med student! Not only do you have to go through all the blood, sweat, and tears involved in getting through med school (literally), you also have to prepare for all kinds of situations, including some strange medical stories during practice. So yes, it takes a lot of guts to do this job!
But enough with these rookie-level Halloween puns. Let’s get to the real spooks as we have a few dark tales to trick or treat yourselves these days.
Here are some stories that we hope will tickle your curiosity—from weird medical facts to peculiar practices and practitioners in history—and show just how far we’ve come in medicine!
A Strange Medical Procedure: “Mapping the Empire of Disease” on the Tip of One’s Tongue
Once upon a dark time, the tongue was really problematic for doctors as it kept interfering with a clear view of the mouth and throat. But then, in 1843, a bizarre medical journal just decided that the tongue was actually “the map of the empire of disease.”
In that moment everything changed, and for more than a century, “mapping” a person’s tongue was a standard medical procedure to identify diseases. According to a Dr. Benjamin Ridge, the sides of it indicated kidney problems, the tip: intestinal problems, and the edges: brain problems.
What’s more, “The tongue was also said to be a near-infallible lie detector,” as found in the Strange Medicine: A Shocking History of Real Medical Practices Through the Ages book by Nathan Belofsky. What a read!
Lucky for us, there’s no more “mapping the empire of disease” nor lies inside our mouths. Doctors nowadays know that a tongue depressor will work just great to examine patients.
A Haunted Hospital Story: Game of Strange Connection
And the prize for the spookiest ghost encounter in a hospital goes to L. Rambo, a pediatric CVICU/NICU nurse with 25 years of experience, according to a Quora thread on strange medical stories for nurses:
“Although I was not ‘in the room’ when this happened, the patient repeated the events to me afterward. I worked with children who were born with cardiac defects. Many underwent surgical repair or palliative intervention in order to extend their lives. One such patient had a particularly rough course prior to losing his battle with heart disease. It was utterly devastating for the doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists who had grown close to him. We grieved his loss.
Later in the week, a patient was transferred into the same room he had died in. As the nurse entered the room to introduce herself, she witnessed the little girl sitting on the floor playing and talking as if another person was with her. Her mother asked her who she was talking to and she stated, “The little boy who was here before we were. He’s sad and he’s lonely and he wants me to play with him.” She would often wake up at night and ask for him by name. I have no explanations as to how or why she would know who he was.”
There are quite a few un-boo-lievable stories shared in medical communities and hospital settings in the U.S. And these strange medical stories keep fascinating people, including health professionals, as we can see in social media.
There are many medical reasons behind visual hallucinations and such ghost encounters. But another important thing to consider, especially as a health provider, is the role of cultural and social factors in the assessment of patients who experience them.
A Peculiar Practitioner: The Scary Case of Dr. Freeman
One historical figure whose story is still sending shivers down everyone’s spine is Walter Freeman.
Dr. Freeman was not a surgeon but soon became the “father of frontal lobotomies.” Freeman was a strange man mentored by the Nobel Prize winner Egas Moniz, who was actually the first doctor to perform a prefrontal lobotomy in 1935.
Freeman was also impatient and not very fond of using instruments that “would break off in patient’s skulls”—and many other things that today are essential for patient’s safety (starting with sterilization). So he began practicing a simpler technique that went through the eye instead of the brain.
According to the same Strange Medicine book mentioned above, “Freeman generally used ice picks from his kitchen drawer, especially those from the Uline Ice Company. He’d hammer them in with a mallet, and then scrape, like a windshield wiper. Attending doctors often fainted.”
This is just one of the many spooky stories and disturbing medical facts about Dr. Freeman; another one was that, during the summer, he would go traveling with his wife and kids driving his “lobotomobile” and practice his famous procedures at local hospitals in between camping trips to national parks.
Fortunately, traditional lobotomies fell out of practice in the U.S. the moment Freeman performed his last operation in 1967 that resulted in the patient’s death. Today, we have much more humane forms of treatment to use that can guarantee patients’ rights and safety.
It’s a Med, Med Word: From Brain Freeze to Coccyx
We couldn’t decide on a medical term with a really weird origin story, so we got two of these.
The first one is something that not many people can say out loud, but if you love to “speak medicine,” here it is: Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. It refers to that brain freeze you get when eating low-temp food like ice cream and getting an instant headache.
The etymology is as complex as it sounds and is derived from Greek and Latin: sphen refers to the sphenoid bone, palatine to the palate, gangli to the neural ganglion, neur to the nerves, and algi to pain.
The second medical term with a rather interesting story is Coccyx, the scientific name for the “tailbone.” It’s a Latin word coming from the Greek word kokkux for “cuckoo,” due to the triangular bone resembling a cuckoo’s beak. Although it sounds funny, the coccyx pain is not.
A Full Moon = a Busy Emergency Room: Myth or Reality?
The story of full moon nights being a time of spooky occurrences and magic has been going on for many centuries. But is it really connected to actual increases in emergency cases or hospital admissions?
The moon does have a real influence on life on Earth—besides gravity—and this has been nurturing an eternal fascination for its wonders among poets and doctors alike.
The truth is that lunar phases can influence a person’s quality of sleep, according to small-scale studies.
However, when it comes to the idea that the full moon makes people more aggressive or that healthcare facilities admit more patients during full-moon nights, researchers agree to disagree. Studies like the one conducted by Swedish and American researchers in 2019 show no significant connection between moon phases and a rise in violent behavior.
So is there any truth in the popular belief that a full moon equals a busy emergency room? Definitely not.
According to this study on the impact of lunar phases on emergency operations and intraoperative blood loss from 2011, more than 40% of the medical staff was convinced the moon cycle can affect human behavior, but scientific data analysis did not support this belief.
Additional studies have proved no real correlation between lunar phases and complications in cataract surgery, lunar phases and the quality of radical cystectomy, or lunar phenomena on the incidence of emergency cases.
However, the phenomenon still seems to hold some real significance for doctors and medical staffers who are unsettled when working on a full-moon night, according to this WSJ article.
Medical history has its share of bizarre, unexpected, and disturbing stories to tell. Fortunately, medicine has come a long way and the weird-o-meter has dropped a lot! Still, the thrills and frills of clinical practice are always there since health practitioners are constantly working to make that difference between life and death for their patients.
Don’t worry, though. Even with a strange happening or scary experience that this job is bound to bring you at some point, your healing hands, nerves of steel, and a bit of Osmosis will get you through.
In that spirit, we’re here to simplify things with the right study techniques to retain, understand, and study more efficiently throughout your health professional program.
Join Osmosis Prime and enjoy a large collection of interactive videos and practice questions for nursing and medical students. In the meantime, just have a spook-tacular Halloween!
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