Back in the early days of the Internet, there was this text that used to circulate via email that was supposedly a medical journal article. It had to do with a doctor who treated a patient whose scrotum was all swollen, and discolored, and had metal bits in it.Read the full interview with David Mikkelson here.
They eventually coax the story out of the patient: he worked in a machine shop, and when everyone else went to lunch, he would use the belt sander or some piece of machinery to pleasure himself. He ended up catching his scrotum in the machinery and it tore open, but instead of going to the emergency room like most other people would, he picked up an industrial stapler and stapled his scrotum back closed, and didn't seek medical treatment for several days after that.
So, since this was way back when, I had to track down the medical journal to verify that the article had actually been published — which meant trekking out to UCLA, because those things weren't online yet. But once I verified it was a real article, I still had to eliminate the possibility that it was just something published as a joke, or something like that. I had to track down the doctor who had written it, who was retired back in Pennsylvania. I sent him a letter and he replied, saying that yes, he'd treated that patient, and that he'd seen the article tacked up on bulletin boards all over the world. That was one of the ones I did not expect to be true!
Labels: skepticism