10 Of The Strangest Medical Studies Of All Time | Healthy Living slideshows | Well Being center

Effects Of Opera On Mice That Have Had Heart Transplants

Winners of the 2013 IgNobel prize for most improbable research in the field of medicine, doctors Masateru Uchiyama, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niim shared the award for their investigations of how playing opera for mice given heart transplants affected the activity of T cells against the surgically implanted organ. Publshing their research in the actual medical journal Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, the doctors found that playing an opera, in this experiement, La Traviata, had greater benefits on the immune systems of the mice than exposing them to tones of 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 10,000, or 20,000 cycles of seconds. The researchers also found that opera stimulated the production of red blood cells.

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Uchiyama, M.
Jin, X.
Zhang, Q.
Hirai, T.
Amano, A.
Bashuda, H.
Niimi, M. (2012). "Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells". Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery 7: 26. doi:10.1186/1749-8090-7-26. PMC 3338095. PMID 22445281. edit

Advice To Doctors On How To Keep Colonoscopy Patients From Exploding

It's bad enough that, at least once you pass the age of 50, your doctor constantly nags you about getting a colonoscopy. It's even worse that preparing for colonoscopy is, to put it politely, unpleasant, and that the experience is utterly undignified. But who knew that a colonoscopy could also cause the patient to explode? Apparently this happens often enough that the medical journals decided to run not just one but two papers about it. Researchers Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti with their collaborators published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology and in the European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology that coagulating tumors in the colon is only safe when the colon is perfectly cleansed before the procedure.

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Ben-Soussan E, Antonietti, M, et al. (2004). &quot
Argon plasma coagulation in the treatment of hemorrhagic radiation proctitis is efficient but requires a perfect colonic cleansing to be safe&quot
. European Journal of Gastroenterology &amp
Hepatology 16 (12): 1315.

Decision Making While Dealing With An Urge To Urinate

Do you ever encounter decisions in which you "gotta' decide" at the same time you "gotta' go"? Salespeople proffering coffee and soda, and police interrogators offering suspects glass after glass of water know that an urge to void urine affects decision-making. More specifically, stifling the impulse to urinate also reduces the impulse to make hasty decisions that may be retracted later. In 2011, researchers Mirjam Tuk, Debra Trampe, Luk Warlop, Matthew Lewis,Robert Feldman, Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, Peter Snyder, and Paul Maruf were awarded the IgNobel prize for their discovery that an urge to urinate increases memory of facts but decreases the ability to analyze them.

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Tuk MA, Trampe D, Warlop L. (2011). &quot
Inhibitory Spillover: Increased Urination Urgency Facilitates Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains&quot
. Psychological Science 22 (5): 627–633.

Treating Asthma With Roller Coaster Rides

Dr. Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University and Dr. Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, both in the Netherlands, were awarded the 2010 IgNobel Prize for their discovery that asthma can be treated with roller coaster rides. The Dutch researchers discovered that emotional stress peaks just before a scary rollercoaster ride and is much lower immediately after it. The scientists also learned that people who have chronic asthma, understandably, tend to be afraid of not being able to breathe. When they have fear for their lives on the rollercoaster, however, they "forget" to be afraid of their asthma.

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Rietveld S, Van Beest I. (2007). &quot
Rollercoaster asthma: when positive emotional stress interferes with dyspnea perception&quot
. Behaviour research and therapy 45 (5): 977–987.

Sixty-Year Study Of Knuckle Cracking

The 2009 IgNobel Prize for Medicine went to Donald L. Unger of Thousand Oaks, California, who conducted a sixty year long experiment of whether popping the knuckles causes arthritis of joints in the fingers. Every day foor over six decades, publishing his findings in 1998, Unger popped the knuckles of his left hand but not his right hand. Not noted in Mr. Unger's citation for the IgNobel Prize is any indication of whether popping knuckles causes any joint damage or not. His dedication to this not so terribly important research question of medical science proved to be enough to earn him the prize.

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Unger DL (1998). Does knuckle cracking lead to arthritis of the fingers? Arthritis &amp
Rheumatism 41 (5): 949–950.

Expensive Placebos Perform Better Than Inexpensive Placebos, Even Though They Are Both Placebos

When people know a pill costs more, they expect it to work better, even if it is a placebo, researchers Dan Ariely and Rebecca Waber discovered, in their breakthrough research leading to their IgNobel Prize. Telling some test subjects that they were being given a pill that cost $2.50 and others than they were being given a pill that cost $0.10 to stop the pain of electric shock, the researchers then gave their research study participants mild electric shock and asked them to rate the pain. Significantly more study volunteers reported higher pain when they were told they received the $0.10 pill, although neither contained any kind of pain reliever.

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Waber RL, Shiv B, Carmon Z., Ariely D. (2008). Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy. Journal of the American Medical Association 299 (9): 1016–1017.

Side Effects Of Sword Swallowing

Swallowing swords has side effects? Who knew. Sword swallowing is a form of entertainment involving the passage of a sword through the mouth and throat into the stomach without touching any part of the mouth, the walls of the throat, or the esophagus. Surprisingly, deaths from sword swallowing are relatively rare. Only 29 have been reported since 1880. Researchers Dan Meyers and Brian Witcombe received their 2007 IgNobel prize for unlikely research results when they discovered that there are also side effects to side swallowing, including distension of the esophagus so that stomach acid can spill upward in acid reflux, and minor, unnoticed perforations of the throat, stomach, heart, and lungs.

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Witcombe B, Meyer D. (2006). Sword swallowing and its side effects. BMJ 333 (7582): 1285–1287.

Why Woodpeckers Don't Get Headaches

In 2006 Dr. Philip R. A. May of the University of California at Los Andegles and Dr. Ivan R. Schwab of the University of California at Davis won their IgNobel Prize explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches. Publishing in the British Journal of Ornithology, May and Schwab found that the woodpecker's skull is relatively thick but spongy, so that it absorbs the force of the beak driven into wood. The bird experts noted that the woodpecker's brain is relatively small, as fans of Woody Woodpecker cartoons would probably agree, and that the surface area of the bird's brain is unusually small even related to its size. That is, the bird has a tiny, thick brain inside a large, air pocketed skull.

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Schwab, I. R. (2002). Cure for a headache. British Journal of Ophthalmology 86: 843.

Curing Hiccups With Rectal Massage

Most of us know several home remedies for hiccups. Maybe we would advise someone who has hiccups to try breathing in and out of a paper bag. Maybe we would sneak up behind them to give them a scare. Or maybe we'd prepare some kind of drink to calm their stomachs. Chances are, however, most of us do not offer friends and family members who have hiccups a soothing rectal massage. Dr. Francis M. Fesmire of the University of Tennessee Medical College won his 2006 IgNobel for publishing a paper on how emergency room physicians can use this technique to treat hiccups that are so bad that they require hospitalization.

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Fesmire, F. (1988). Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage. Annals of Emergency Medicine 17: 872–198.

Malaria Mosquitoes Turned On By Stinky Feet, Stinky Cheese

If you don't want to come down with malaria on your tropical vacation, don't take any Limburger cheese sandwiches with you when you trek into the jungle, 2005 IgNobel prize winners Ruurd de Jong of Wageningen Agricultural University and Bart Knols of the Internatonal Atomic Energy Agency (a rather strange sponsor of Limburger cheese research) tell us. You may not want to take off your shoes, either, as the researchers discovered that the Anopheles mosquitoes that calrry the disease are equally attracted to stinky cheese and stinky feet, or at least that female malaria mosquitoes are turned on by human body odor.

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Knols B. (1996). On human odour, malaria mosquitoes, and Limburger cheese. The Lancet 348: 1322–1322.