Medicine is constantly evolving. New vaccines and therapies have reached incredible levels, and millions of people around the world are successfully cured of those diseases that a century ago were considered God's curse. However, even today, doctors are faced with real medical mysteries.
The woman who hears her eyes move
Lancashire, England.
Julie Redfern from Lancashire played the popular computer game Tetris 8 years ago and heard a funny squeaking sound. It was not clear where this sound was coming from until Julie realized that it was heard every time she moved her eyes. It turns out that she heard the sound of her eyeballs moving. After a few years, Julie discovered that she could also hear her blood running through her veins. The sound from chewing was so loud to her that she could not hear the conversation at the table. Worst of all, the disease became so severe that her eyes literally shook in their sockets when the phone rang. Julie was diagnosed with SCDS (Superior Channel Dissection Syndrome). This is a very rare condition in which the bones in the inner ear lose density, making hearing extremely sensitive. Medicine became aware of this disease in the 1990s, and it was Julie who performed the first surgery to restore normal hearing. Doctors have successfully restored normal hearing to one of her ear, and this gives hope for a cure for the other ear.
The boy who doesn't feel hungry
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Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Landon Jones, 12, woke up one morning in 2013 without his usual appetite. He felt very tired - he was tormented by an incessant cough. His parents took him to the hospital, where doctors discovered an infection in the boy's left lung. Soon the infection was defeated, and the boy's health, at first glance, returned to normal. However, after being discharged from the hospital, his appetite never returned. With a lack of desire to eat and drink, Landon quickly lost weight before his family realized what was happening. By that time, the teenager had lost 16 kilograms.
Doctors don't know what exactly is blocking Landon's hunger and thirst. After illness, his parents showed him to medical experts in five cities, but to no avail. All they can say is that Landon is possibly the only person on the planet with this condition.
Now the boy needs to be constantly reminded to eat and drink. Even teachers have developed a habit of checking whether he is eating or drinking while at school.
Doctors are currently investigating possible treatments and are working to find out if Landon may have hypothalamic dysfunction, which is what drives our perception of hunger and thirst. The exact cause of Landon's illness remains a mystery at the moment.
Mysteriously paralyzed girl
Tampa, Florida.
In November 2013, the mother of nine-year-old Marisya Hryvny took her daughter to the hospital for a flu shot. And this little girl was already celebrating Christmas in a wheelchair and was not able to talk as she used to.
Three days after the flu shot, Marisue was unable to get up in the morning. She also failed to speak. Frightened parents took the child to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed her daughter with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM). The disease begins when the immune system attacks the myelin sheath, which frames the nerves in the brain and spinal cord. The white matter in the brain and spine without myelin becomes extremely vulnerable. Once this membrane is damaged, paralysis and blindness can occur.
Doctors cannot confirm or deny the parents' accusation that the cause of her illness was a flu shot that had been given shortly before. Karla and Stephen Hryvna have done extensive research and refuse to believe that the vaccine has nothing to do with it. Medical experts have confirmed that the exact cause of ADEM is unknown and that the results of several tests done by Maris are, in fact, not informative in terms of determining the cause of the girl's illness.
The future looks bleak for Maris, even though doctors believe there is little chance of symptoms reversing.
Girls crying with stones
Yemen.
Earlier this year, Yemeni resident Mohammad Saleh al-Jaharani was very surprised when his eight-year-old daughter Saadiya began to cry with tiny stones instead of tears.
Saadia has eleven more siblings, but she is one of a kind. No one is able to diagnose Saadia, while doctors cannot find anything unusual in her eyes.
Another girl with a similar problem lives in the same area. Fifteen-year-old Seburah Hasan al-Fejia experienced the same unusual symptoms, but she had another problem - she passed out for at least several hours every day. Seburu was examined in Jordan and appears to have been cured.
But, unfortunately, with Saadia, everything is different - the doctors who examined her could not help her. Locals in the village whisper that the girl might be possessed or cursed.
In an interview with reporters, Saadia's father said that sometimes she cries with normal tears, and stones usually appear at the end of the day and at night. Fortunately, she does not suffer from pain, even though sometimes up to a hundred small stones appear from her eyes a day.
12 girls with the same cryptic symptoms
LeRoy, New York.
Many would call it a case of mass hysteria, but when 12 girls from high school in New York developed the same strange symptoms, doctors were forced, albeit unsuccessfully, to seek an explanation.
One day in 2011, after a short sleep, one of the schoolgirls, Tera Sanchez, woke up with disobedient limbs and vocal tics. Never before had anything like this happened to her, especially with the strange verbal outbursts, due to which, it would seem, she suffers from Tourette's syndrome - a tic-like twitching of the muscles of the face, neck and shoulder girdle.
The strangest thing is that 11 other girls from the same high school developed the same symptoms. The neurologist diagnosed all the girls with conversion disorder. Simply put, he believed the incident was a case of mass hysteria.
Other doctors believed tension was the main factor causing these strange symptoms. However, two mothers, including Tera's mother, did not believe the doctors' study. Even after health officials ascertained that there was nothing in the school itself to disgust or reject the girls, the two mothers were not provided with evidence of the investigation and were not satisfied with the results.
During media interviews, Tera still suffered from convulsions, stuttering and uncontrollable verbal outbursts. To date, no satisfactory explanation for the incident has been given.
The girl who did not grow old
Reisterstown, Maryland.
By the time Brooke Greenberg passed away at the age of 20, she had never learned to speak and could only move in a wheelchair. Even as she got older, her body refused to age. At the time of her death, Brooke's mental capacity was identical to that of an infant and she was still the size of a child.
Scientists and doctors have never found an explanation for Brooke's disease. She was a “miracle child” from the very beginning: she survived several stomach ulcers and a stroke, she also had a brain tumor that put her to sleep for two weeks. When Brooke finally woke up, the tumor was gone. The doctors were confused.
The way the girl's body developed during these years was also very strange. At the age of 16, she still had milk teeth, but the bones matched the structure of those of a 10-year-old child. She recognized her siblings and expressed joy.
Richard F. Walker, a retired medical examiner at the University of Florida School of Medicine, has made it his life to discover what this medical mystery, known as Syndrome X, is hidden. a man with a boy's body.
The woman who restored her eyesight
Auckland, New Zealand.
New Zealand resident Lisa Reid had no hope of recovering her eyesight after losing her at age 11. But at the age of 24, she accidentally hit her head and woke up the next morning with normal vision.
As a child, Lisa was diagnosed with a tumor that pressed so hard on her optic nerve that she lost her sight. Doctors could not do anything for Lisa, who learned to live with her illness and used the help of a guide dog.
We can say that it was Amy, the guide dog, who helped Lisa regain her sight. One night in 2000, Lisa knelt down to kiss her beloved dog before bed. Trying to reach Amy, she hit her head on the coffee table.
Lisa did not attach any importance to a mild headache and went to bed, but when she woke up the next morning, the darkness before her eyes disappeared. She saw as clearly as in childhood. Fourteen years later, Lisa can still see.
The boy who can't open his mouth
Ottawa, Canada.
Tetanus is a fairly common disease in dogs, but a similar case in a newborn baby puzzled doctors at an Ottawa hospital last year.
Little Wyatt, born in June 2013, couldn't open his mouth to scream. So he spent the first three months of his life in the hospital while doctors tried to figure out how to help him. In the end, the doctors sent the little boy home and told the parents that there was no clear cause for their son's illness.
Over the next months, Wyatt was on the verge of suffocation six times. His saliva collected in his mouth and blocked his airways because he was unable to drool like most babies.
Medical experts used Botox to try and loosen Wyatt's jaw, and it helped open the baby's mouth a bit. However, the problem is still relevant, because the dangers associated with these diseases are likely to increase as he gets older.
This June, Wyatt had to eat through a feeding tube at a first birthday dinner. His parents also noticed that the child cannot blink both eyes at the same time. Doctors continue to conduct research in the hope that a solution can be found.
Woman with a new accent
Ontario, Canada.
In 2006, a strange feeling of confusion and weakness made Rosemary Dore head to the nearest hospital. She suffered a stroke that struck the left hemisphere of her brain.
Prior to her hospitalization, Dore spoke in her native southern Ontario accent. Everyone was amazed when one day she suddenly spoke in an Eastern Canadian accent. The doctors decided that due to the stroke, Rosemary Dore had developed foreign accent syndrome, which appeared most likely due to a brain injury.
Further examination of the medical history revealed that Dora's speech slowed down and began to change just before she had a stroke.
Experts who have conducted extensive research in the area noted that there have been around 60 confirmed cases of foreign accent syndrome worldwide. One of the first was a woman from Norway who was wounded by a bomb shrapnel during the Second World War. Immediately after the injury, she suddenly began speaking with a German accent.
The Girl Who Feels No Pain
Big Lake, Minnesota.
When Gebbie Jingras was very young, she constantly poked her fingers into her own eyes. One of her eyeballs eventually had to be removed. She also mutilated three of her fingers as she chewed them constantly.
The girl suffers from an extremely rare disease that renders her insensitive to pain. By the age of seven, she was forced to wear a helmet and goggles to protect herself. Footage from the documentary, filmed when she was four years old, shows a child banging his head against the sharp edges of a table without any painful body reaction.
Unfortunately, this disease cannot be cured, because a cure has not yet been invented for hereditary sensory autonomic neuropathy - a genetic disorder that the girl suffers from. In 2005, Oprah Winfrey invited Gebbie and her family to talk shows, where her parents talked about the fear they experience on a daily basis. Once Gebbie broke her jaw, and because she couldn't feel pain, no one noticed it for a month.
On top of that, Gebbie's body is not capable of regulating temperature in the way that a normal person's body does. The girl is now 14 and lives a relatively normal life. Parents are still closely watching her, and Gebbie herself tries to be aware of her every action.