Synesthesia is a condition which causes 54 different types of reactions. The reactions can be very bizarre. People who have this condition have reported they can taste colors and smell sounds. How many people have this condition? It is thought about one out of two thousand people are synethetes. More females have it than males. This condition is not considered a disease. If you are left handed you have more of a chance of having synesthesia than if not. Most of the people who get this are above average intelligence and that group has no more of a chance of getting a mental disorder than any other group. One of the interesting things about this condition is people do not know they have anything wrong until they learn they do. They learn people do not taste color and such. Certain things trigger the reactions and that trigger will only affect one symptom. Visual perceptions are of geometric patterns or color and not a picture.

There are also diseases out there which border on science fiction. One of these is Cotard’s Delusion, Walking Corpse Syndrome. A person with this sickness believes they have missing body parts. These parts could be anything even their brain. They sometimes believe they are dead so what do they do? They visit cemeteries so they can be with their kind. This is a disease of the brain and is caused by a dysfunction in the part of the brain which is responsible for personal identity. They can look at their bodies and not realize they are looking at themselves. If you visit a cemetery and notice a strange looking person hanging around it could be someone with this disease, but rest assured they are harmless.

People have investigated the idea of vampires for hundreds of years and some have found coffins which contain bodies which had wooden stakes driven through their hearts. Hopefully we have evolved beyond believing there really are vampires, however there is a disease which could have made the more uneducated believe someone was a vampire. It is known as Xeroderma Pigmentosum or Vampire Syndrome. The disease is rare but strikes about one in a million people. These people are very sensitive to UV rays. They have to stay out of the sunlight. Going into the light could cause these people to have cancer. This condition is caused by a mutation of the nucleotide excision repair enzymes. This means when sunlight damages DNA it cannot be repaired.

I can’t help but think the disease I am about to tell you about has inspired a few horror movies. Remember those movies where a dismembered hand would crawl around and do whatever it wanted which was usually chocking someone to death? There is an actual disease which is something like that except the hand is still attached to the body. The disease is known as Alien Hand Syndrome. As strange as the name is, the disease is even stranger. People with this condition have no control over one of their hands and that hand will do things on its own such as pick things up and make other movements which are not under the control of the person the hand is attached to. There is no cure and the only way to stop the hand from doing this is to keep it engaged.

I could go on and talk about other exotic conditions and diseases, but I thought I would use the rest of this article to talk about strange reasons why people have gone to the doctor and also strange accidents. I think most of us have heard of tapeworms. They can live inside our intestines. One man was feeling discomfort but decide to live with it for two years before going to the doctor. It turned out a beef tapeworm was living inside him. What a horrible thought, this is why I would never eat sushi, raw fish can contain a parasite.

One poor guy was a tourist swimming in the Red Sea when he banged into a school of fish. This is not something you hear about very much, because it is a very rare happening. Even rarer was what happened to him. He began to develop a droopy eyelid which swelled up. It just wouldn’t heal so finally he went to a doctor. The doctor told him he had an inflammation and when surgery was performed tubular structures were also removed from his eyelid. It turned out when he banged into the fish, bones from a fish had embedded themselves in his eyelid.

Sometimes you have to wonder how certain things happen, this is one of those times. A woman was attending a New Year’s party when she accidently swallowed her earring. The poor woman had asthma and needed to use an inhaler. Before using one of these devices you should always look to see it is clear, her device wasn’t, an earring had gotten attached to it in her purse and when she drew in a breath from the device she also swallowed her earring.

One poor woman was sitting on her couch with her husband and they were watching television. She leaned back to sneeze and when she did that was when the trouble started. The force of her sneeze caused her to be paralyzed. When she sneezed her muscles contracted so violently they ruptured a disc which cushions her vertebrae and this trapped a nerve between the bones causing unbelievable pain which stopped her from moving. She suffered for years until a type of mechanical device consisting of a tiny spring and rods was inserted between the vertebrae. Powerful sneezes can cause powerful problems.

One poor woman in Ireland was walking along minding her own business. As she walked along she was passing a parking garage. When she got next to it a car fell from the second story on top of her.

One television personality did something which injured her and it was something most of us have never done. She somehow was able to bite down on the skin below her tongue. That area is known as the frenulum. She has no idea how this happened and neither do I.