The 6 Most WTF Medical Procedures That Inexplicably Exist
Say, do you like modern medicine? Sure you do. There are accounts from the Dark Ages of doctors attempting to cure the "feeble-minded" by cutting a cross-shaped wound into their heads with razors, peeling the flesh back all the way down to the skull, then rubbing salt all over it to scare the demon out. And it worked, if the demon was life and the goal was to make that life stop. Which is to say, don't peel someone's skull skin off and salt the wound. That's really piss-poor medicine. But modern medicine is great -- it gives us pacemakers, insulin pumps, super awesome robot limbs, and dogs in wheelchairs.
For all the awesomeness medicine provides, it also has its disinfected fingers in a few weird pies that you never even knew existed. Stuff that, even if it is useful (and not all of it seems to be), it's certainly weird as shit. And that's an official medical diagnosis. The prognosis is comedy!
Head Transplant
Doctors can transplant all manner of body parts these days, from hearts to ears to dongs (probably). And now it seems like you can put heads on that list. Heads. Your head. Or someone else's head on your body, assuming your body is free and in need of a new head.
Up until now there were a few barriers in the way of a proper head transplant. The big hurdle, of course, is that you need a head, and so does everyone else. Got a bodiless head and a headless body? That's two dead guys. But say you have them on ice and they're still fresh and mostly free from freezer burn -- now what? Any morbid maniac with a needle and thread could technically sew those things together, but hey, you could sew a patch that says "Belieber 4 Life" onto your own scrotum -- it doesn't mean you should, and it doesn't mean you'll benefit from it in any way.
The big problem with a head transplant is making the body work after the head is attached. They've been sewing animal heads on new bodies all holus-bolus since the 1970s, but the resulting frankenpoodles were all paralyzed because reattaching the spinal cord is hard as shit to do. Or it used to be. Because thanks to research by the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, the problems with reattaching that spinal column have been overcome, and now we can all swap noggins!
"I'm a donor. My finger, my butt, your nightmares."
OK, maybe it's not as simple as all of that, and the procedure hasn't been tested yet, but the science is there. The terrible, creepy science.
Say you're in an accident in some kind of industrial head separatoring machine like they use in the back of Walmart or whatever and oh shit, there goes you head. As is tradition, your body is turned to mulch and you're in a bit of a bind. Luckily, a guy across town was also in a head separatoring machine, but he went in upside down and his head is now a pudding. So you and him meet up at the hospital and a doctor puts you two crazy cats together. Now when you wake up, you have creepy new hands that you're afraid to pick your teeth with, and when you poop, it's probably not a color you're used to because those guts aren't yours. And your crotch is a whole new crotch that probably isn't pleasant to you because how can you like having new genitals? What if your new junk is bulky and weird? What if it smells funny? What if there's a mole on it? How will you ever handle having a new body?
If the new body heebie-jeebies don't get you, then taking a moment to think about tissue rejection ought to scare the shit out of your new ass. What if that body rejects your head? That's literally the most awful thing I can think of. Do you want your head going necrotic? It's your head!
Toebesity
Look at the title of this entry. Look at that word, that preposterous portmanteau. Portmantoe. Portly Man's Toe. Good God. Toebesity is the shameful moniker made up by someone in the cosmetic surgery racket to describe fat toes, which is apparently a thing. An honest to goodness thing.
Due to the fear of what your feet may look like in sandals and other footwear that relies heavily on foot nudity, people began going to surgeons and asking for some manner of invasive, slicey way to slim their toes down. This wasn't even a thing a surgeon dreamed up, this was a recurring request from vapid, shallow, awful humans that eventually inspired surgeons to shrug and start shaving the fat-ass toes of rich people.
The surgery can cost around $2,500, and it consists of the removal of fat and bone to make the toe smaller. There are legit medical reasons for doing this sometimes, things like hammertoe, but there's a larger market for people who just want their feet to look better and are actually, non-jokingly self-conscious about the size of their toes. A better surgery for people like this would be to have a doctor remove the excess asshole tissue that is clearly making them into giant assholes, but that may be against some kind of Hippocratic oath.
Eyelash Transplants
Your eyelashes exist solely to keep things like grit and bugs and transplanted dongs out of your eyes. They're like a really weak-ass security system easily overcome by anything capable of forward momentum. Still, if we didn't have them, our eyes would be gooey, muddy, dust-laden messes all the time, so it's pretty useful to keep them around.
While you and I flaunt our eyelashes like pompously arrogant lash sultans of old, some poor folks have no lashes, or suffer conditions that cause them to fall or even be pulled out (because that's really a thing, and it's sadder than a puppy with its leg in a sling). And, surprising to no one, some people are just really vain and want more lash than genetics offered them at birth. The solution to these problems is eyelash transplant surgery.
"Ryan Seacrest did this to me. For no reason."
You'll notice right away that your eyelashes are a bit of a niche product on your body. You don't really have a lot of other hairs that are similar, barring those few of us who engage in the classical art of pube topiary. And even then, you don't want pubes for eyelashes because you'd just end up looking like a disgraceful sponge with a well-worn scrubby side and pupils.
The actual procedure for lash transplantation is to remove hairs from the back of your head and sew them into your eyelids. So your new lashes are head hairs, which means they keep growing. If you let them, they'll grow about as long as the hair on your head normally grows, which is why you need to trim your new transplants once a week after getting them. Doesn't that sound fun?
I like the idea of someone growing preposterously long, limp eyelashes that look like Cher's hair in the '70s, like weird curtains for their eyes that get tangled and knotted, because that kind of thing amuses me. I also assume that your eye crud that forms every morning has the potential to get all caked and nasty in your extra-long lashes, making you look diseased and uncomfortable to be around first thing in the morning.
Fecal Transplant
Every comically awkward surgery wishes it could be as hilariously awkward as this surgery. Penis enlargement, hemorrhoid removal, labia reduction? They have no game to bring. A fecal transplant wins the crown for being the weirdest, most awkward surgery of all time. It's taking shit from one ass and putting it, medically, into another ass. This sort of thing is considered entertainment according to certain German videos I have seen. But now doctors do it and it can save your life. Or at least improve the quality of your life, which is a completely new level of hilarious. You could right now be living a poor-quality life because the shit in your ass is just not good enough. And then you could have your shit replaced with better shit, and end up feeling better. Because of shit. You're aware of what we do with shit, right? You shit it. In the shitter.
The reason the procedure exists is because of Clostridium difficile, a literal pain in the ass bacterium that kills thousands of people. Antibiotics that kill it also kill off healthy bacteria in your intestines and leave you open to getting reinfected with the bad stuff. A fecal transplant, however, gives you an assload of healthy poop, including healthy bacteria, to help you overcome the infection, and its success rate is much higher than the antibiotics.
How do you get an assful of someone else's crap? Glad you asked. They can use a colonoscope or just give it to you with an enema. Or, if you like to live on the wild side, a tube right down your nose. I have found no evidence of any kind of ass-to-ass transfer, nor any mention of how you harvest the donor sample or if there are rules for how to determine what constitutes a good shit for a transplant. If I were a decent man, I'd end the entry here, but I'm seriously curious about the nature of shit selection in this case. Does the donor need to be on a specific diet for several days in advance? Of course I'm skirting around the issue of corn here. You know what I'm talking about. Is a certain consistency necessary? Who decides this? The mind boggles.
Triple-DNA Babies
Most babies have two parents, with the exception of some trailer park babies that seem to be born via poor choices physically manifesting themselves as a dirty child in jean shorts who holds eye contact for too long and only eats macaroni and cheese. Researchers in the U.K., however, have created a technique to toss a third party into the mix, effectively making your baby the living embodiment of all the hilarity of Steve Guttenberg's classic film 3 Men and a Baby.
A small percentage of women have faulty mitochondria. You may remember mitochondria from their brief appearance in the Star Wars prequels when they were called Midi-chlorians and esteemed actor Liam Neeson was forced to spout some pseudo-scientific philosophical bullshit about how it had something to do with the Force in a way that made all of us sadder and stupider. In real life, mitochondria are the energy source for all our cells, and because science is fun, they don't share our DNA. They're like a parasite from way back when. But because faulty mitochondria can lead to some genetic disorders, and because it's not really our DNA anyway, you can use the mitochondria from a third person when making a baby via in vitro fertilization. Apparently. So there's mom's egg, dad's sperm, and Octomom's mitochondria in an embryo stripped of all its other genetic material. Or whomever.
"Part of me will be in you. It'll be the part that fucks everything up."
Realistically, there's probably not a lot wrong with this procedure, and the mitochondrial DNA is all but insignificant to the way the child forms and its parentage. It's unlikely the resulting baby will have three different colored eyes or live between the rows of a corn field trying to kill people who run afoul of its small town, but most journalists ignored that when they first reported on the procedure, instead enamored of the idea of freak babies, because freak babies sell papers. Or they would, if anyone still bought the paper.
While the science doesn't support the creation of super mutant babies, it does support the creation of hilarious jokes about having a mother, a father, and whatever you want to call the donor party. I'd vote for mather. It can be your super cool parent who, when Mom and Dad let you down, gives you cool presents and money and lets you drink wine on holidays when no one is looking because you're barely related so who gives a shit if you grow up to be a train wreck? Good ol' mather.
The G Shot
You can tell a medical procedure is awesome when the doctor responsible for it makes up a punny name for it, and then gives it its own website. Does thoracic surgery have a website? Fuck no it doesn't, it doesn't even have a Tumblr. Breast enlargement seems to have several websites, if my research is any indication, but by and large, most procedures have nothing.
The G Shot is a procedure meant to temporarily increase the function of a woman's G spot. It increases the size and sensitivity of the spot with the use of hyaluronan, a man-made polysaccharide that is kind of like collagen that they toss in all kinds of skin care products. Basically they inject this stuff into the G spot and then bam -- bigger, more sensitive G spot. Time to enjoy more awesome sexings.
The issue with the G Shot is that no medical body approves or even recommends having it done. It's never been demonstrated to be safe or effective, it's not necessary, since it's only for people who already have normal sexual function anyway, and it runs the risk of causing damage by doing the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do, as well as causing pain during sex, scarring, infections, and more. It's the equivalent of a man having collagen injected into his wang to make it meatier without any idea if it'll still allow for boners.
That said, the doctor who created the procedure, whose name is Dr. Matlock, assures us on the G Shot website that 87 percent of women report awesome results, and it seems unlikely to me that a guy named Dr. Matlock who invented a way of fattening G spots would lie about a thing like that on a site called TheGShot.com.
