Many people already have a healthy fear of going to the doctor. Unfortunately, that fear may be well-founded, especially when you consider the horrific mistakes that happen every day in hospitals around the world. Most people have heard horror stories of medical instruments being left in patients, a common mistake that happens to an estimated 4,000 people every year in the US. However, there are many other medical and surgical errors that still happen to unsuspecting patients, often causing severe injuries or death.

10Surgery On The Wrong Person

This is a mistake that the National Quality Forum considers a “never event.” This means that it’s a serious reportable event (but not necessarily something that’s completely preventable) that is hoped to never happen in a hospital. But in many cases, the problem is preventable, like when surgeries are performed on the wrong person. Even with new protocols, there have still been reported errors in which the wrong patient has received an invasive surgery. In a prostate biopsy mix-up, one man had his healthy prostate removed while the man who needed his cancerous organ removed was left untreated.

One of the most horrifying examples in recent history was when a woman woke up just before her organs were harvested for transplant, like something out of a gory horror movie. Not only did they mistake her for someone else, they mistook a living person for a corpse. Luckily, the 41-year-old woman opened her eyes just as surgeons were about to remove the organs. Although the surgery was stopped in time, the fact that the surgical staff was about to remove organs from a patient who was still alive points to a plethora of mistakes that are horrendous to contemplate.

9Air Embolisms

The very air that keeps humans alive can also kill them during surgery. Air that is allowed to enter the bloodstream during surgery can cause a blockage in the circulatory system, an event known as a venous air embolism. Air embolisms in surgery are rare, but they still occur more often than they should. Air embolisms can cause a pulmonary embolism—or blockage in the lungs—which is the leading cause of preventable hospital-related deaths.

Venous air embolisms from catheters have a 30 percent fatality rate. Even people who survive can be left with permanent physical disabilities, such as severe brain damage. What is most frightening about air embolisms is that they can happen during very routine surgeries, yet are extremely deadly. For example, a seemingly simple dental implant surgery recently turned fatal when an oral surgeon gave air embolisms to five patients in one year, killing three of them. The air is thought to have been introduced into the patients’ bloodstreams through the hollow dental drill.

8Blood Transfusions

Receiving a blood transfusion during a hospital stay is common—it’s estimated that 1 in 10 hospital stays where a medical procedure is performed will involve a blood transfusion. Unfortunately, this routine aspect of medical care can also be extremely dangerous when mistakes are made, most commonly when the wrong blood is given to the wrong patient. Out of every 10,000 units of blood that are transfused to patients, it is thought that one of these units is the wrong blood for the intended patient.

The most common mistakes in blood transfusions revolve around identifying the blood and patient correctly. Blood can be incorrectly labeled when collected, the wrong blood can be dispensed, or medical personnel can administer the wrong blood during surgery or at the patient’s bedside. From July 2008 to July 2009, there were 535 blood transfusion errors reported through the Pennsylvania Patient Safety Authority alone. Fourteen of these mistakes resulted in serious adverse effects, and one patient died during surgery.

7Wrong Surgeries

One of the surgical mistakes that’s considered a “never event” is when patients receive the wrong surgery. In a study of medical lawsuits, 25 percent were for patients who received a different surgery than what they were scheduled for. Over a 20-year period, 2,447 lawsuits were filed for surgeries that were performed for the wrong procedure.

Despite all the safety procedures that have been put in place to ensure that wrong surgeries do not happen, they continue to occur more often than acceptable. One woman had her fallopian tube removed instead of her appendix, while another patient received a heart operation that was not needed. One of the most tragic stories is that of a pregnant woman who was scheduled to have her appendix removed in 2011. Instead, her ovary was removed, leaving the infected appendix inside her. The woman was readmitted to the hospital three weeks later when the mistake was discovered, but unfortunately, she miscarried and died on the operating table.

6Wrong Medication Or Dose

Most people assume that the medicine they receive from their doctor or pharmacist is the correct drug at the correct dose, but millions of people every day get the wrong prescription. Out of over three billion prescriptions that are annually doled out in the US, it is estimated that 51.5 million errors occur—that’s 4 out of every 250 prescriptions filled. The danger is twofold: Patients could receive harmful drugs that they don’t need, or they could not receive the drug that they do need. Either case can be fatal.

These medication errors happen at both pharmacies and hospitals. One tragic example is when two premature twins died due a nurse’s fatal mistake. The babies, who were born at 27 weeks at Stafford Hospital, were given a lethal dose of morphine—650–800 micrograms instead of the 50–100 micrograms they were supposed to receive.

In another fatal drug error, a 79-year-old man was given the paralytic drug pancuronium—one of the drugs used in lethal injections—instead of an antacid for his upset stomach at North Shore Medical Center in Miami, causing the man to become unresponsive within 30 minutes.

5Infections And Contaminated Medical Supplies

Most people go to the hospital to be treated for illnesses, yet this is also where many diseases and infections originate. Exposure to deadly illnesses through contaminated medical instruments or poor staff hygiene isn’t something you hear about too often, but it occurs with alarming frequency. Between 2012 and 2014, dozens of patients were exposed to the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from contaminated surgical instruments in at least four different hospitals in the US.

Infection from contaminated equipment is another “never event” and also one which is completely preventable. According to the most recent US Center for Disease Control’s Healthcare-Associated Infections Progress Report, preventable infections from hospitals in the US are improving but are still too prevalent. It is estimated that 1 in 25 hospital patients contract an infection while in the hospital, with about 75,000 people dying due to these infections every year.

4Misdiagnosis

It’s understandable that extremely rare diseases might be misdiagnosed. The popular TV show House was based on exactly that premise. However, there is no excuse when symptoms of common ailments are overlooked due to incompetence.

It is estimated that 80,000 Americans die each year from ailments that are misdiagnosed. One woman went to the emergency room complaining of neck pain and a headache, but was having trouble vocalizing her symptoms. The rushed emergency room doctor dismissed the issue as just a muscle pain, releasing her with only pain medication. The next day, the woman was readmitted to the same emergency room and died of cardiac arrest from the stroke she had apparently been having the day before. The doctor who had treated her the previous day admits that he should have recognized the signs of stroke, blaming himself for her death.

3Urgency

Anyone who has been to the emergency room lately knows how crowded they have become. However, you’d assume that those in need of immediate assistance would still receive the care they need. This is not always the case. Too often, patients are left untreated when the medical help they need is just down the hall.

One 39-year-old woman was admitted to a Bronx, New York hospital just before 5:00 AM after complaining of abdominal pain. Although the woman was listed as “urgent” and blood tests were drawn, she remained untreated until well into the afternoon. Finally, the physician in charge of her case ordered a CAT scan and noticed fluid accumulation. They brought the woman in for surgery to search for an embolism. She died on the operating table, 13 hours after she was admitted to the hospital for a treatment that she should have received within minutes. What makes this story even more tragic is that, if they had followed up immediately on the initial blood tests, they would have easily recognized that she had internal bleeding and she could still be alive today.

2In-Hospital Accidents

The Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality (AHRQ) estimates that close to a million patients each year sustain a fall while they are under medical supervision in a hospital. The agency estimates that about one-third of these falls can and should be prevented.

The misuse of bed rails in hospitals and long-term care facilities is also a major concern. The FDA has documented almost 500 deaths from the use of bed rails, admitting that there are probably many more deaths that have not been correctly attributed to these devices. Patients who are very ill and have limited mobility can become wedged in between their hospital mattress and the bed rail, causing suffocation and strangulation.

1Operating On The Wrong Body Part

Surgeries on the wrong body part—such as amputating the wrong appendage or removing the wrong kidney—are some of the most common surgical mistakes. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study which estimated that 1,300–2,700 of these “wrong body part” surgeries are performed every year in the US—that’s about 40 per week. Even with precautions, such as physically marking the body before surgery, these inexcusable surgical errors still occur.

In Rhode Island, one hospital performed three brain surgeries on the wrong part of the brain in less than a year. All three incidences involved the same brain surgeon. In 2010, a man in Florida had his healthy kidney removed instead of his gall bladder, which was the intended organ. The surgeon was fined only $5,000 for his error.

Rebecca is a full-time freelance writer from Washington state. Visit her at her LinkedIn or view her freelance writing profile on Elance.com.

Medicine has changed a lot over the years, but you’d be surprised at the unconventional nature of some of the medical procedures we’re still using today. These are 10 of the most bizarre medical treatments of our times.

10Fighting Skin Cancer With Cryotherapy

Cryogenics is a specific area of scientific research that deals with extremely low temperatures. You’ve almost certainly heard of the recent fad of getting frozen in a cryogenic chamber in the hopes of being revived by superior technology in the future. As it turns out, cryotherapy also has uses in current medicine and is being increasingly used to cure diseases like skin cancer.

The process largely consists of putting liquid nitrogen on a piece of cotton and applying it to the affected area. The only catch is that the part of skin treated with this method cannot be looked at or studied under a microscope because the frigid nitrogen literally burns it, so it’s hard to get an accurate biopsy of the diseased tissue after the treatment. There are also a few side effects—for one thing, you can expect pain and blisters for days due to the burning. There could also potentially be scars, but a little disfiguration is nothing compared to an effective treatment for cancer.

9Rebirthing Therapy

Rebirthing therapy is precisely what it sounds like—a therapy in which you pass through a very tight area in order to recreate your birth. The idea is to make you feel the same way you felt back then, which is supposed to refresh your senses and make you experience the miracle of infancy again. The therapy involves being passed through pillows, which are pressed together by the therapists to replicate the birth canal. Breathing might become difficult in the middle of it, but that’s just part of the process.

If that sounds a bit weird, law enforcement thinks so, too. The procedure has had its share of controversies, and quite a few people have reportedly died from it in the past—maybe because of the breathing thing we mentioned earlier. As it stands now, the therapy is illegal in Colorado and North Carolina.

8Symphysiotomy

Symphysiotomy is a procedure by which the pelvis of a pregnant woman is manually widened to allow for childbirth in lieu of a caesarean section. In places without apt medical equipment, saws are used to cut it wide enough for the child to pass through comfortably. That might sound like something from medieval history, but the procedure was widely used by Irish doctors between the 1940s and 1980s. The women were often not told in advance what the doctors intended to do, and the consequences were often horrendous. The victims weren’t able to walk, and they usually developed infections and back problems—basically, all the things you’d expect from having your body cut up with a saw.

The issue has only come to public light recently, and there are plenty of survivor groups fighting for justice even now. Some medical bodies have issued their apologies to the victims, and more survivors are now coming out with their stories in light of the increased media attention.

7Tooth In Eye Surgery

Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis is a procedure for blind patients with damaged eye tissue. It involves pulling one of your teeth out and implanting it in your damaged eye. And it works—the transplant is based on the idea that once the body senses a tooth instead of, say, a mechanical implant, the body won’t reject it. A part of the jawbone is surgically separated for the process, then they drill a hole through the tooth to hold a prosthetic lens.

Once the transplant is successful and it’s been accepted as a part of the body, the doctors can replace the tooth with an artificial hold. The procedure is not yet widespread, but it has helped a number of people regain their eyesight. The doctors who perform this surgery have had a fair rate of success, and it might be fairly common in the future.

6Malaria Injections

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was the first of the only three people to have ever received a Nobel Prize in the field of psychiatry. Wagner-Juaregg was also one of the few psychiatrists to treat his patients through biological means, such as infecting them with malaria to cure diseases like syphilis. He was one of the doctors in charge of the psychiatric asylums in early 20th-century Austria, where the patients were coming down with a range of illnesses like pneumonia and typhoid.

Inspired by these cases, he started experimenting with deliberately giving people malaria to see its effects on other, unrelated diseases, which largely turned out to be successful. Wagner-Juaregg was working at the same time as Sigmund Freud, who was also from Austria, and even though Freud never won a Nobel, his psychoanalytic approach to psychiatry became much more popular than Juaregg’s biological one in the rest of the world.

5The G-Shot

If you want your G-spot to perform better than it usually does, G-Spot Activation therapy is probably for you. The procedure is meant to make it easier for a guy to locate it by literally increasing its size. After numbing it with anesthesia, they inject the G-spot with chemicals to artificially increase its size for a healthier sex life. The criteria for getting the injection is quite strict, though—you should be a sexually functioning female who knows where her G-spot is, and you shouldn’t have any other problems, like allergies or a loose vagina.

The procedure is very brief, and you can probably get back to having sex within hours of getting the shot. It’s been surprisingly successful—in a study done on women who had gotten the procedure, about 87 percent were found to be satisfied with the results, with better orgasms, increased libido, and a general improvement in their sex lives.

4Laughter Therapy

We all know that laughter is good for the body, but you may not have known that raising your hands in the air and laughing like a maniac is an increasingly popular therapy in countries like India. The therapy is largely a result of the efforts of Dr. Madan Kataria in 1970s Mumbai, who can be credited with bringing laughter into mainstream medicine. Laughter therapy is usually done in groups, and Kataria set up the first “laughter group” 40 years ago. There are currently about 5,000 different groups around the world dedicated to just laughing together.

In places where it is the most popular, it’s not unusual to see a bunch of random people throwing their hands in the air and laughing loudly every evening at the local park. It’s not really a sham procedure, either—research does indicate that laughter helps the body produce more warrior cells to fight off diseases.

3Bee Sting Therapy

Getting stung by a bee isn’t a lot of fun, but apparently it’s good for you. Apitherapy is based around the idea of finding medical uses for bees, and some of that includes letting them sting you. Practitioners don’t even go through the trouble of injecting the bee venom with a needle—an actual, live bee is held near the skin by tweezers and forced to sting the patient. The bees are often raised by the patients themselves, and some treatments involve getting stung about 80 times a day.

Apparently, bee venom is beneficial against arthritic pain and inflammation, and has long been used against these ailments; the earliest examples of the use of bee venom come from the ancient Egyptians, who used it to treat arthritis. The patients often report positive results from the treatment, so it’s fast catching up as a viable therapy for problems related to pain, like multiple sclerosis and tendonitis.

2Desert Sand Therapy

In Siwa, an oasis in the city of Cairo, Egypt, it’s an ancient belief that the hot sand of the desert has some sort of medicinal properties, so travelers and locals routinely allow themselves to be buried in it to rid their body of skin problems and other diseases. First, they dig a hole in the ground in the morning, allowing it to absorb all the good rays of the Sun, and at about 2:00 PM the patient lies down in the Sun-soaked hole. It is believed that the hotter it is, the more effective the treatment will be.

Then they cover the whole body with sand except for the head, which is kept in the shade by blankets set on a couple of sticks. If the ground gets damp with sweat, the wet sand is replaced with dry, hot sand to keep the procedure going.

1Three-Parent Babies

Using three people to make a baby is a relatively new procedure, but it’s being increasingly seen as a legitimate practice. Though mired in controversy, several countries are currently in deliberation over whether or not they will allow three-parent embryos. The main draw is that it would give parents-to-be the ability to prevent genetic diseases from passing on to the offspring.

During the procedure, nuclear DNA from the mother is dumped into a donor’s egg, which has been cleared to leave only healthy mitochondrial DNA. The father’s sperm is added, and the baby is born with genetic material from the mother, father, and the donor. It works because only the mitochondrial DNA from a mother carries genetic diseases, so with that taken out of the picture, the baby is born healthy. Nuclear DNA carries the traits, like eye and hair color, so the baby will still effectively be the offspring of the true parents. The procedure is done through in vitro fertilization, and the embryo otherwise grows up normally.

As we mentioned, the procedure has had its share of problems. It raises questions on whether we should be tinkering with our original design, though it can really help the large number of people who suffer from genetic disorders. Researchers believe that three-way fertilization can revolutionize the medical field, but people opposing it say that if the procedure becomes widely accepted, the next step can only be human cloning—despite the fact that three-way fertilization doesn’t involve genetic modification.

You can follow Himanshu on Twitter, or check out his stuff over at Cracked.

Flowers are nature’s way of tricking insects into helping plants have sex, and as a side effect, humans have something to make their gardens look prettier. There are about 350,000 species of flowering plant, and most of them are innocent souls. But a heaping handful of them are vicious killers with zero remorse.

10Kalmia Latifolia

Kalmia latifolia, more commonly known as mountain laurel, produces delicate pink and white flowers in the late spring. It’s the state flower of both Pennsylvania and Connecticut, and it grows just about everywhere in the eastern United States. It’s gorgeous, but underneath that dainty exterior beats the heart of a murderer.

The two main toxins in Kalmia latifolia are andromedotoxin and arbutin, but it’s the first one that you need to worry about. Andromedotoxin simultaneously causes part of the heart to beat quickly and part to beat dangerously slowly. In healthy people, the heart has a natural gate that blocks half of the electrical pulses coming to the organ. The toxin induces Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, which disrupts that gate, letting all the pulses reach your heart. The result? Sudden cardiac death.

But that only happens with large doses. In smaller doses, you can expect to start with a lot of vomiting, after which every hole in your head will leak its fluids down your face. About an hour later, your breathing will slow down, you’ll lose the ability to use your muscles, and you’ll slip into a coma and die.

The terrifying part is that you don’t have to eat the flowers—honey from bees that have visited Kalmia latifolia contains all the toxic properties of the flower itself. The Greeks called it “mad honey,” and they used it to defeat Xenophon of Athens in 400 B.C.

9Jacobaea Vulgaris

Ragwort, a common wildflower in the UK, is an important part of the local ecosystem. Almost 80 insects get food from the plant, and at least 30 of those feed on ragwort exclusively. Because of that, the flowers hold particular interest for conservation societies. That’s good news for the bugs but bad news for everybody else. The World Health Organization has confirmed the presence of at least eight toxic alkaloids in ragwort, and it may have at least 10 more on top of that.

The problem is that unlike most poisons, which quickly leave the system, the alkaloids in ragwort build up in the liver over time. The accumulating toxins result in liver cirrhosis, a condition in which the liver slowly folds in on itself as healthy cells degenerate into an unresponsive mass of scar tissue. The liver’s a resilient organ and will continue operating like normal until up to 75 percent of it’s been destroyed, but by the time symptoms start appearing, the damage is irreversible.

Symptoms include loss of coordination, blindness, stabbing abdominal pains, and yellow eyes from bile pigment that fills the eye’s surface membrane. Unfortunately, this is another toxin that makes its way into honey, as well as into milk from goats who eat ragwort. As a final slap on the face, when farmers try to remove ragwort from their fields, the toxins can seep right into the skin of their hands.

8Veratrum

Found on nearly every mountain in the Northern Hemisphere, Veratrum species put out gorgeous spiral clusters of white, heart-shaped flowers. The plant is commonly grown for ornamental purposes because even the leaves look pretty, and in the wild, it’s commonly confused with garlic. But pretty or not, every piece of this plant, from the roots to the pistils, is lethally toxic.

The first symptom of Veratrum poisoning is violent stomach cramping, which usually starts about 30 minutes after ingestion. As the toxins absorb into the bloodstream, they make a beeline for the sodium ion channels. Sodium ion channels act like gates to allow sodium to flow through nerves, triggering an action. For example, the opening of sodium ion channels in muscle cells starts the process that leads to a muscle contraction.

When Veratrum toxins hit the sodium ion channels, they open the floodgates, forcing the channels to fire continuously. The body doesn’t know what to do with this, so the heart begins to alternately slow and speed up. Muscles all over the body convulse. Eventually, the toxin either causes a heart attack or a coma. It’s believed that this is the poison that killed Alexander the Great.

7Zantedeschia

The gorgeous perennial Zantedeschia has been introduced to every continent but Antarctica and is a staple in ornamental gardens. It’s often called a calla lily, even though it’s not even remotely related to lilies and doesn’t look anything like one. The bright, tube-shaped flowers can be a variety of colors.

Zantedeschia species contain calcium oxalate, a chemical that forms needle-like crystals inside internal organs. More than 1,000 types of plants contain calcium oxalate, and Zantedeschia is one of the most dangerous, partly because it’s so widespread. Even a tiny dose of the chemical is enough to cause a person’s throat to swell, usually along with an intense burning feeling.

The more you eat, the worse the symptoms become, until your throat swells so large it squeezes your airways shut. In one incident, a Chinese restaurant accidentally put the flower petals from a toxic plant into their food, putting everyone who ate it in the hospital.

6Colchicum Autumnale

Colchicum autumnale is native to the UK, but it can now be found across most of Europe and New Zealand. One of its common names is “naked lady,” which is a deceptively sexy name for a cold-blooded killer. The only known antidote for Colchicum poisoning is a slow, painful death.

The chemical at work here is colchicine, a poison that kills with methods similar to arsenic, systematically shutting down of all of your body’s vital functions. Mass organ failure, blood clots, and nerve disruptions are just a few of the horrifying symptoms of Colchicum poisoning. Every few days, a new set of symptoms appears as yet another internal system goes belly up.

Death can take anywhere from days to weeks, but when you eat enough, it’s always fatal. And for whatever reason, the flower leaves you conscious to the bitter end, forcing you to live through each excruciating moment. People have compared death from Colchicum to cholera.

5Laburnum

Everybody’s brain is hardwired to accept nicotine through receptors the same shape as nicotine molecules. Despite their name, nicotinic receptors can also bond with other chemicals. One such chemical is cytisine.

In low doses, cytisine isn’t terribly harmful. As a drug, it sometimes helps people quit smoking because of its ability to bond to nicotinic receptors. But in large doses, it’s positively lethal.

Laburnum poisonings have been recorded for centuries and usually involve children who eat either the flowers or the seed casings, which look like pea pods. The cytisine, which is present in every single part of the tree, starts working in minutes. Poisoning starts with intense vomiting followed by streams of foam pouring out of the mouth. After about an hour, the convulsions start.

Normally, convulsions occur intermittently, like ocean waves. But with cytisine poisoning, the convulsing waves are so close together that your muscles permanently contract, which is called a tetanic contraction. It all culminates in a deep coma and death. Fortunately, people don’t usually die from Laburnum poisoning these days as long as they get to the hospital in time.

4Cerbera Odollam

Cerbera odollam probably has the most accurate alternate name in the entire plant kingdom: To Indian locals, it’s known as the “suicide tree.” And its reach goes far beyond suicide—according to a team of researchers who investigated a number of deaths in the southwest region of India, Cerbera odollam is the perfect murder weapon. In a 10-year period, at least 500 deaths were confirmed to be the work of the flower-bearing tree, which kills through a potent glycoside called cerberin.

Cerberin starts working within an hour. After some light stomach pain, you slip into a quiet coma, and your heart politely stops beating. The entire process takes place in about three hours. The chemical is untraceable after the fact, which is why it’s commonly used as a discreet murder weapon. A research team in India believes that up to twice as many people died from Cerbera odollam as they discovered—most likely homicide victims in cases where nobody thought to suspect foul play.

3Sanguinaria Canadensis

Commonly known as bloodroot, Sanguinaria grows wild in eastern North America. Native Americans used the blood-red roots as an ornamental dye, but they also used it to induce abortions. Enough of it will put you in a coma.

People more recently have taken to using it as a home remedy for skin cancer, with horrible results. Bloodroot contains a chemical called sanguarine, which, in addition to being a dangerous toxin, is an escharotic substance. Escharotics kill tissue and slough it off as a creamy pulp, leaving behind a dark black scar called an eschar. In other words, putting bloodroot on your skin causes your skin cells to kill themselves.

The same thing happens internally. The chemical disrupts an enzyme called Na+/K+-ATPase, which does the important job of pumping sodium out of cells and pumping potassium in. When that doesn’t happen, all functions break down.

2Adenium Obesum

Native to Africa, Adenium obesum has been used as a spear poison by tribes for centuries. The desert rose, as the preparation is called, is made by boiling the plant for 12 hours before removing all the plant matter and letting the liquid evaporate. The resulting goo is a highly concentrated poison. It’s so toxic that just a bit of the poison from a spears or arrows brings down large game before they can run 2 kilometers (1.2 mi), so hunters can stay on their trail while they gradually bite the dust.

This specific plant has been used by tribes all over Africa to kill animals as large as elephants, and now that we’ve studied it, we know why. The plant contains a chemical called ouabain, which causes almost immediate respiratory failure at high doses.

Another flower in the Apocynaceae family grows in the same region, and hunters often use it in conjunction with Adenium. It also contains ouabain, and it turns out that humans aren’t the only African natives using its killing power—the African crested rat will chew the flower’s bark and lick his hair with the toxins, turning itself into a scurrying ball of unexpected death.

1Oenanthe Crocata

In 2002, eight tourists in Argyll, Scotland decided to forage some choice water parsnips from a nearby stream. Prize in hand, they returned home and put them in a curry dish. The next day, four of them were in the hospital. What they’d thought was water parsnip was actually Oenanthe crocata, or hemlock water dropwort. The plant has mortality rate of up to 70 percent, so the group was lucky nobody died.

Hemlock water dropwort has an interesting property. It’s lethal, sure. But the killer toxin, oenanthotoxin, relaxes the muscles around your lips and forces you to smile, even when you’re in the throes of fatal convulsions. The plant has been used in Greece since at least the eighth century B.C., when Homer coined the term “sardonic grin” to describe the grisly smile adorning the faces of water dropwort victims.

When the world ends, our cities will crumble and be reclaimed by nature. At least, that’s the popular image. But you don’t need to wait for the apocalypse to see how things will crumble. You don’t even need to leave civilization—there are plenty of glimpses of the post-apocalyptic world hidden right among us.

10Public School 186

It would be impossible for Manhattan’s Public School 186 to be any more in the middle of civilization. Businesses are open across the street, there isn’t a free parking space in sight, and people stroll by nonchalantly. It’s boarded up, but it’s the trees growing out of the windows which give away the fact that no one has used the building for over 40 years. Inside, piles of rubble and scattered animal corpses complete the look.

The school was opened in 1903 but ran into problems in the early 1970s. Its floor plan didn’t meet fire safety codes and the ground floor doors had to remain open at all times to ensure that children couldn’t be trapped. Those open doors soon led to problems. Criminals robbed parents at knifepoint and a teacher’s aide was raped in a classroom. When fire inspectors found that the fire alarm didn’t work in 1972, the school was marked for closure. It shut down in 1975.

The building was due to be renovated in the 1980s, but the Boys and Girls Club of Harlem that bought it decided to demolish the building and start again. Residents petitioned to save the building, but the owners say that it would be too expensive. While they battle it out, the building continues to look increasingly like a set from I Am Legend.

9North Brother Island

Located just half a kilometer (.3 mi) from Manhattan in New York’s East River is a bird sanctuary known as North Brother Island. In the 1880s, people with infectious diseases were quarantined there at the Riverside Hospital. Its most famous resident was Typhoid Mary, who died on the island in 1938. The island later housed veterans from World War II and was the base of a drug treatment center. In 1964, the last people left and it was closed to the public.

A few people have been let back onto the island between September and March when the birds aren’t nesting. Among the thick vegetation that now covers the island are huge brick buildings, bungalows, and a chapel. One classroom still has dozens of old books scattered across the floor. The buildings are all slowly being hidden by trees and ivy.

Christopher Payne, a photographer who was given permission to visit the island, described it as “what would happen if people left the planet.” He described the atmosphere as a sense of being disconnected from the rest of the world, though it turned out to be impossible to forget how close the rest of New York City was. “I could hear the Mister Softee truck sometimes,” he said.

8Miami Marine Stadium

Naumachia were mock naval battles that took place in flooded coliseums in ancient Rome. Gladiatorial combat is a staple of post-apocalyptic fiction (you can thank Mad Max 3). So if you want to host your own dystopian naumachia, Miami’s Marine Stadium is the perfect venue.

The 6,600 seat arena was opened in the 1960s as a venue for speedboat racing. It was closed in 1992 after Hurricane Andrew and has since become a haven for graffiti artists and freerunners. It’s an imposing, poured-concrete structure. The stadium’s designer said that he had intended to create “a piece of sculpture on the water reflecting on what nature was providing us.”

There’s debate over what to do with the stadium. The Friends of Miami Marine Stadium want to see it cleaned up and returned to use. Others believe it should be left as it is, a monument to the graffiti artists who have adopted it over the decades.

7Box Hill Brickworks

Melbourne’s Box Hill Brickworks adds a steampunk theme to its derelict charm. The brick-making plant was built in 1884 and operated for a century. It was closed in 1988, but its brick chimney still towers over the local landscape.

The real charm is hidden inside. Mazes of walkways hover above masses of rusting machinery. There are even hand-written sales records scattered in an old office. The site is a time capsule of technologies. A tramway and blacksmith’s shop are essentially unchanged from the 1880s.

The world-gone-to-hell atmosphere is completed by the landfill on the same grounds. It looks like a normal grassy field—except for the plumes of flame that occasionally burst from the ground. When methane from the buried waste isn’t exploding by itself, local youngsters have been known to drop matches into sinkholes to trigger blasts underground. This all takes place very close to people—the barbed-wire fence for the brickworks borders a park that is usually full of playing children.

6Bloomingdale Railway

If you’ve ever wondered what urban hiking will be like once the end comes, Chicago’s Bloomgindale Railway will give you a fairly good idea. This three-mile-long abandoned railway is elevated above the busy city. After it was abandoned by Canadian Pacific Railway in 2001, its overgrown tracks became popular as a route for joggers and cyclists. In winter, it also offers the unique experience of cross-country skiing through the middle of a busy city where every street is plowed.

The feel of an unattended city isn’t going to be around for much longer, however. Search for Bloomingdale Railway and half the pictures show a train track being reclaimed by nature. The others are artists’ impressions of the mass restoration project that will soon turn the track into a modern park and walkway. While undoubtedly good for Chicago, those who have come to love the railway over the last decade have said that they expect to be nostalgic for the post-apocalyptic landscape.

5Tower Of David

Centro Financiero Confinanzas is an unfinished skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela. Construction began in 1990, but a 1994 banking crisis left it incomplete. The 45-story building has a heliport but lacks elevators, utilities, windows, and railings. Since the 1990s, 3,000 squatters have made their home in the unfinished shell. The “Tower of David,” nicknamed after its chief backer who died in 1993, is now the world’s tallest slum.

Motorcycles are used as taxis to carry people up the first 10 floors, and it’s on foot from there to the 28th. No one lives any higher than that, but it is possible to get to the top. There’s makeshift plumbing and electricity in some areas, but it’s the economy that’s sprung up inside that makes it feel like a set from a dystopian movie. Stores, beauty parlors, daycare centers, and even a dentist cater to the residents. Some apartments look cozy, even if the corridors that lead to them are faded and cracked from disuse.

People salvage metal from the higher floors. Others lift weights just feet away from a dizzying drop with no safety rail. Teenagers use the lights from their cellphones to navigate pitch-black stairways. The community has a bad reputation and the people are wary of outsiders. Yet right outside this little world, the surrounding streets look like a typical modern city.

4Insurgentes 300

Mexico City’s Insurgentes 300 is a building that went to war with the forces of nature. While it’s technically still upright, you couldn’t really say it won the fight. It’s nicknamed the “Canada” building for the 30-meter (100 ft) word that once ran down the side in giant letters. From the outside, it looks like a deteriorating shell, but behind the broken glass there are all sorts of professions that put the building to some sort of use. Every type of criminal—from lawyers and accountants to drug dealers and prostitutes—use Insurgentes 300 alongside dance teachers and screen printers.

It was once home to 420 offices, but half of these have since been converted for use as housing. The building has a 10-degree inclination due to structural damage from an earthquake in 1985. The authorities ordered it evacuated, but the occupants declined and have been fighting to have the structure repaired for 30 years. Instead of maintenance, they’ve received only lawsuits as the building slowly decays around them.

3Red Hook Grain Terminal

The closest thing New York City has to a fortress is perhaps The New York Port Authority Grain Terminal in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Its concrete walls are 20 centimeters (8 in) thick, 12 stories high, and sheer. It’s a behemoth that looks perfect for fending off a hoard of zombies. In fact, a rag-tag bunch of survivors is pretty much all the building is missing to complete its post-apocalyptic look.

Inside, it looks like a cross between a factory, a prison, and a temple. It’s eerie from a distance, and in fog it looks downright sinister. Several pieces have collapsed into the river, and others look destined to follow. New York’s grain economy was already on the decline before the building opened in 1922. It shut down in the 1960s and is known as the “Magnificent Mistake.”

The building is extremely popular with urban explorers, though it’s difficult to get to. One explorer says that it requires research, persistence, and creativity, but mostly nerve, “since you don’t know what you’ll find inside or who might stop you before you make it in, and the repercussions that come with that.” Even if you’re not interested in the building, the journey may be worth it purely for the amazing sunset you can watch from one of the many shattered windows.

2The UK’s Cold War Tunnels

England doesn’t have an official second city, but Manchester and Birmingham are the most commonly suggested candidates. That’s perhaps why each of them is home to miles of underground tunnels built during the Cold War. They’re very literally a glimpse of the apocalypse, since that’s exactly what they were built to withstand. They were also built in secret.

The bunkers under Manchester were tunneled by Polish workers who couldn’t speak English so that they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what they were doing. It once housed several months’ worth of tinned food designed to keep VIPs alive in case of an attack. In Birmingham, many of the entrances to their system remain classified.

1A Lot Of Meatpacking Plants

Founded in 1867, Armour & Company was once one of the United State’s largest meatpacking companies. It fell into decline in the late 20th century, and in its wake it left abandoned plants all over the country. One is a skeletal brick building in Fort Worth, Texas, which was ravaged by fires in the 1970s. Demolition was attempted and there’s a section of wall missing.

It turned out that the building’s steel structure was so strong that it was cheaper to just leave the rest standing. Today, it looks like a prison. Guard towers were added in 2007 to make the plant look like a South American prison for the show Prison Break. The words Penitenciaría Federal De Sona were left above one of the doors.

Another meatpacking plant in Navassa, North Carolina was only open for a few years. Rumors began in the 1920s that the plant’s owner was found hanged in the middle of the factory. The building earned a reputation as haunted. Several people committed suicide there in the 1980s, cementing its supernatural foothold in local folklore.

Yet perhaps the most famous abandoned meatpacking plant is in East St. Louis, Illinois. It’s not far from downtown and has the added bonus of still being filled with old machinery. That includes its once cutting-edge refrigeration system. The plant once employed nearly 5,000 people and became a hotbed of racial tension due its segregated workforce. Since it was closed in 1959, it’s become an infamous beacon for those fascinated with the way the world crumbles.

Alan is tempted to take up urban exploration as it’s the only hobby that’s going to get better should the world end.

While an array of flavorful adjectives can be ascribed to this intoxicating beverage, few words can capture the true soul and spiritual connection that has been shared between man and beer for thousands of years. Since its first batch, beer has brought enlightenment to humanity, encouraging man to manifest himself in a way that would mold a vibrant, expressive, and innovative civilization. Of course, in gratitude for giving humanity its creative input, sharing mythological tales about the epic qualities and creation of beer was also prominent during the evolution of civilization. Raise your glass and fill your mind’s mug with these tales of brew.

10A Heavenly Goat

There’s plenty a goat can provide—cheese, milk, YouTube videos of them fainting—but what if you had a goat capable of supplying an endless current of beer? You would undoubtedly be able to throw the most outlandish keg parties in town, an eternal celebration no stranger to fallen soldiers in the Viking heaven of Asgard.

According to Norse mythology, the principal god Odin houses the noblest of fallen soldiers in his massive banquet hall, Valhalla, on top of which a giant goat brimming with beer named Heidrun is perched. At each daybreak, these warriors hone their battle skills by fighting on the Asgard plain in preparation for their final contest against Ragnarok, the Norse apocalypse. Fingers, hands, and even heads may be sacrificed during the fighting, but at nightfall, their bodies are reassembled and an endless supply of beer and food is offered to all. Heidrun sits atop Valhalla, nibbling on branches from the Norse tree of life and awaiting the dead, with udders full of frothy brew eager to flow down into Valhalla’s bottomless tub. Asgard’s Viking maidens, the Valkyries, serve the fallen soldiers beer after beer in reward for their hard day’s work.

9The Salvation Of Humanity

If your night has ever consisted of sloshing down seven beers, you’re no stranger to the beverage’s intoxicating consequences. Now imagine chugging 7,000 beers, a feat that transcends Andre The Giant’s unofficial world record by 6,881.

The Egyptian goddess of war, Sekhmet, not only sports a head of a lioness but can drink just about anyone under the table. Regarded for her uncontrollable rage, she was originally sent forth by the Sun god, Ra, to destroy evildoers. When she could no longer suppress her lust for blood, she conspired to slaughter all of humanity.

Ra thwarted Sekhmet’s plot by ordering his high priest to whip up 7,000 jars of beer mixed with red ochre and scatter them all over the land. While storming through Egypt in preparation for the massacre of mankind, Sekhmet discovered the red beer and immediately guzzled down every drop, believing it to be blood. Her thirst quenched, Sekhmet drunkenly staggered away, unable to fulfill her plan. Thus, according to Egyptian mythology, beer is the savor of the human race.

8Enlightenment

The oldest piece of written literature known to man, dating somewhere between the years of 2750 and 2500 B.C., The Epic of Gilgamesh originates from ancient Sumeria and recounts the adventures of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk. The epic also tells of a feral half man named Enkidu who was raised by wild animals in the hills and guided toward civilization by a prostitute named Shamhat. Of course, what is civilization without beer?

As a representation of primitive mankind prior to enlightenment, Enkidu is clueless in the ways of man and even unaware of how to accept an offering of bread and beer. Shamhat explains that eating bread is what humans do for survival, while drinking beer is what civilized people do as a custom of the land. Seven pitchers in, Enkidu becomes human, shaves his matted hair, and acquires a proper wardrobe. This evolution from primitive creature to humanity is symbolic of the fierce relationship Sumerians ascribed to beer and the civilization of mankind.

7The Kalevela

The Kalevela is an epic of Finnish mythology published in its entirety in 1849 by Elias Lonnrot. A collection of earlier works ranging from 1000 B.C. through the 17th century, The Kalevela tells the story of the creation of Earth and humanity, but more importantly, the creation of beer. One of the most intriguing aspects of the epic is the number of lines dedicated to beer—approximately 400—while the creation of the Earth is summed up in a measly200. The Kalevela also illustrates the mythological history behind beer’s first fermentation, revealing what scholars believe to be the origins of using hops in the brewing process.

According to the mythology of The Kalevala, a female brewer wished to make beer for a wedding celebration, but to her distress, the beer wouldn’t ferment. She sent a white squirrel into the forest to gather cones from a fir tree, but the beer remained flat. She then sent a marten to collect foam from the mouths of irritated bears, but still, the beer would not bubble. Once more, the brewer sent a honeybee to travel to a desert island and harvest pollen from blooming flowers. Elated, the brewer observed the beer froth up and overflow into the streams of the mythical city of Pohjola, thus creating the first batch of hoppy beer.

6The Hymn To Ninkasi

Since boiled water was used in its brewing, beer was actually healthier than the available canal water in Mesopotamia in 2500 B.C. Additionally, beer contained nutrients all other beverages lacked, making the brew a prominent aspect of the Mesopotamian diet. It’s no surprise, then, that the earliest instruction manual for the brewing process of beer was recorded in Mesopotamia.

The Hymn to Ninkasi—which was also a chorale of praise to the Sumerian goddess of beer, as the title implies—was recorded around 1800 B.C. However, it is believed to be much older, as the brewing of beer in Mesopotamia dates back to 3500–3100 B.C. The hymn instructs readers and listeners to handle the dough with a shovel; mix with sweet aromatics, honey, and grains; soak the malt in a jar; and filter it in the vat. The end result was not just any beer—it was a beer comparable to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, bringing life and enlightenment to all those who partook of it.

5The Hospitable God Of The Sea

While feared by sailors due to the immense amusement capsizing ships brought him, Aegir, the Norse god of the sea, is regarded in the deity realm as one of mythology’s most hospitable gods. The Norse god of thunder, Thor, gifted Aegir with a mile-deep cauldron brimming with ale for use during annual banquets for the gods. With a cauldron of that substantial size, many honorable gods in Norse mythology would gather at Aegir’s golden sanctuary at the bottom of the sea during the winter months and partake in his neverending supply of perfectly crafted ale.

Because of these lavish celebrations, Aegir is known for not only his hospitality but putting any host to shame by providing a literal “bottomless keg” that instantly replenishes mugs upon draining. In fact, so much beer is enjoyed by his guests that the white froth seen atop waves is attributed to Aegir’s massive parties.

4Witch’s Brew

Cerridwen, the Welsh witch-like goddess of barley, resides in the underworld and keeps guard over the Cauldron of Wisdom, which is believed to hold a beer concoction known as the “Brew of Inspiration and Knowledge.” According to Welsh mythology, Cerridwen birthed two children, a beautiful daughter and a hideous son. Taking pity on the boy, she decided to grant him more wisdom than any other in existence, but in order to do so, she has to stir her brew for a year and a day. Soon tiring, she handed the task over to a young boy named Gwion, warning him to avoid tasting or letting his skin come in contact with the brew.

At the end of the year, when Gwion had faithfully completed his duty, three drops splashed out of the cauldron, burning his hand. After sucking on his finger to relieve the pain, he instantly became the wisest to have ever lived. Furious at the enlightened Gwion for unintentionally defying her, she chased after the boy, who met his end when the witch ate him after he shape-shifted into a single grain of wheat in an attempt to conceal himself.

3The Flemish King Of Beer

According to the Flemish myth, a lowly apprentice glassmaker named Gambrinus was rejected by a beautiful maiden he had fallen in love with named Flandrine. Heartbroken and distraught, he fled from his home in Fresne to a nearby forest to hang himself. While there, however, he was confronted by the devil, who proposed a deal. If he could not win Flandrine’s love, the devil would grant Gambrinus the ability to forget the maiden forever, at the cost of his soul in 30 years.

Even with the devil’s luck, Flandrine remained unimpressed with Gambrinus and rejected him yet again. He stormed back to the forest, vexed by his unrequited love as well as his inability to forget the maiden, but to his surprise, a field full of green, aromatic plants appeared before him. The devil explained that the plants were hops and would make a drink called “beer” that was strong enough to make Gambrinus forget about Flandrine once and for all. In addition, he was granted chimes, which he played for the townspeople of Fresne when they complained of the brew’s bitterness.

Unable to resist Gambrinus’s tunes, the townsfolk began dancing uncontrollably and soon became thirsty, acquiring an appreciation for the beer. Gambrinus began playing chimes all around the world to introduce beer to humanity, landing him the title “King of Beer.” In response to his newfound fame, Flandrine returned to Gambrinus to profess her love for him, but as he was too wasted to recognize her, he simply offered her another beer and carried on with his life.

When the devil returned after 30 years, Gambrinus played the chimes until the devil was too tired of dancing and agreed to break off the deal. When Gambrinus died, his body disappeared and was replaced by a barrel of beer, having lived a happy and drunk life.

2Mythology’s Party Animals

Dionysus, the Greek god of pleasure and festivity, seemed to live an enviable life, even for a mythological deity—eternally tipsy, surrounded by a flock of devoted nymphs, and able to cause a ruckus anywhere he goes because “Oh, it’s just Dionysus. He’s probably drunk again.”

But one isn’t born mythology’s most notorious party animal—he had to be taught. His teacher was the sozzled, big-bellied Greek god of beer named Silenus. As a foster father and drinking buddy to Dionysus, Silenus is usually depicted as a jovial man, often having to be carried on the back of a donkey due to his immense enjoyment of all things intoxicating or cavorting all night to a dance he named “The Silenus.”

Unlike most drunkards, who believe beer grants them some sort of philosophical enlightenment, Silenus actually acquired prophetic powers upon a heavy night of drinking, which made him one of Greek mythology’s wisest deities. In fact, he was so respected and renowned that he was once taken hostage for five days by King Midas, who sought his drunken prescient knowledge. Dionysus, concerned for the whereabouts of his tutor, finally discovered Silenus and was so elated by his well-being that he granted King Midas the ability to turn everything he touched into gold.

1The Beer Of Life

Also known by his Welsh name of Govannon, Goibniu is a respected Celtic god and master goldsmith. In addition to constructing the most valuable and sustainable weapons in Ireland, he is also known for his skill and craft in brewing the most vital of beers.

According to legend, his brew was crafted with fruit from trees of the Otherworld, a realm of Celtic deities, and rendered the drinker indestructible in battle. Even those with a simple illness could take advantage of Goibniu’s fantastic ale, as it could cure any sickness. If thought worthy enough, a soldier killed in battle could be placed in Goibniu’s cauldron and brought back to life, fully intact.

The primary purpose of his beer, however, was to bestow immortality and invincibility upon Celtic deities. Served at the sacred Manann’s Feast of Age, all those sipping the heady elixir were granted immortality as well as eternal youth.

Anyone familiar with privatized healthcare probably knows from experience that the Hippocratic Oath often gives way to hypocrisy in the form of surprisingly high medical bills for simple procedures. But sometimes, healthcare professionals also succumb to the temptation to sidestep government regulations and rake in millions of illegal dollars. And when exploitation becomes that profitable, it can inspire shockingly villainous levels of dishonesty—sometimes even blatant patient endangerment.

10Changing The Definition Of “Sick” To Admit More Patients

With the constant barrage of news stories about all the food additives and household objects that can give us cancer or otherwise damage our health, the last thing we need as a society is another excuse to descend into hypochondria. But even when we do succumb to the urge to treat every itch and hiccup as a symptom of the plague, we should still be able to trust nurses and physicians to set us straight with the proper diagnosis.

Florida-based Health Management Associates saw it differently. With the aid of complex software and a little old-fashioned strong-arming, the for-profit hospital admitted an excess of patients who needed little or no medical attention in order to bill Medicare. Hospital staffers were so eager to treat visitors that an infant whose body temperature registered at 37.1 degrees Celsius (98.7 °F)—one-tenth of a degree higher than the average temperature of 37 degrees (98.6 °F)—was documented as having a fever, resulting in needless and costly medical tests.

But not everyone involved in the hospital ruse was a willing participant. According to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed against the company, it was standard practice to fire physicians who refused to play ball, and administrators with ethical concerns about excessive hospital admissions suffered similar fates. Unfortunately, because of the increasingly convoluted financial affiliations and colossal scales that are coming to characterize groups like Health Management Associates, these kinds of abuses will likely be a persisting nightmare for regulators.

9Delegating Medical Treatments To Unqualified Staffers

Dr. Ravi Sharma was a certified thoracic surgeon who sought to help people lose weight through his Florida-based Life’s Image weight-loss center. And while one might not think of a chest doctor as the first person to run to with a severe case of glut-gut, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the clinic to at least be staffed with professionals who know how to treat weight-related medical problems.

Unfortunately, Dr. Sharma was too busy being courted by dollar bills to worry about whether the people tending to his patients had any real clue what they were doing. Instead of recruiting certified professionals to perform vein injections and other invasive procedures, Sharma relied on untrained staffers—including an office manager—to do the work. The thoracic surgeon not only didn’t perform the procedures, he wasn’t even present to oversee them. Instead, he often texted the instructions for performing ultrasounds and varicose vein injections to his staff, according to one complaint against him.

To make matters worse, many of the invasive procedures were unnecessary, performed only for the purpose of charging extra money. Sharma, who only saw a few patients himself, sought Medicare payments for the procedures that his untrained assistants performed as well. But everything fell apart when he fired office manager Patti Lovell, who repaid the gesture by exposing Sharma’s indiscretions in a whistle-blower lawsuit. Sharma, however, having learned that money is the best medicine, simply made his troubles disappear by paying the government $400,000 and has since continued to practice medicine without further punishment.

8Exploiting Workers’ Compensation Claims

For the average Joe just looking to make ends meet, a severe workplace injury offers little more than physical agony and the dire prospect of being unable to provide for your family, not to mention the crippling debt of hospital bills. Thankfully, society has provided an invaluable safety net in the form of workers’ compensation, which covers the cost of recuperation from job-related accidents.

However, for orthopedic hospital owner Michael Drobot, workers’ compensation insurance was the unwitting inspiration for a 16-year, $500 million fraud. Through a series of bribes issued to doctors, chiropractors, and other professionals, Drobot’s clinic pulled in scores of patients who were undergoing surgery for work-related spinal injuries. Thanks to this scheme, many injured workers were sometimes sent hundreds of miles away from their homes for their operations instead of being scheduled for surgeries at the most convenient locations.

To ensure that his chicanery went unchecked, Drobot ingratiated himself with California state senator Ronald S. Calderon with the help of $100,000 in blatant bribe money. But since being apprehended, the corrupt hospital owner has done nothing but talk in attempts to reduce his punishment, dragging down Calderon and others in the process.

7Pretending Patients Are Terminally Ill To Get Medicare Funding

Hospices are essentially healthcare purgatories where the terminally ill wait out their final months under the care of staff trained to make their exit as painless as possible. They also happen to reduce hospital expenses and place a smaller financial burden on the Medicare program, which only covers expenses for hospice patients who are diagnosed with six or fewer months to live. Accordingly, hospitals and hospices have a large incentive to identify dying patients who no longer wish to extend their lives.

But between 2001 and 2013, Vistas Hospice Services, America’s largest privatized palliative care service, squandered millions of dollars in Medicare reimbursements on healthy and otherwise ineligible individuals. To promote these deceptive hospice enrollments, Vistas paid bonuses to staffers who played along, all while ignoring doctors’ and nurses’ concerns about the suitability of the care being administered. And in addition to this blatant subsidy abuse, Vistas also improperly identified some patients as suitable for crisis care, a highly expensive recourse reserved for patients who are severely impaired by illness. These bogus expenses were in turn passed off to taxpayers through Medicare reimbursements.

In one of the most telling cases, Vistas charged Medicare $170,000 to provide intensive nursing assistance to a woman who was not only not critically ill, but healthy enough to live on her own and perform household chores. Other patients who were supposedly knocking on death’s door were going to church and attending bingo halls. Because of such wholesale dishonesty, Vistas’s crisis care costs were almost six times that of the national average. These kinds of aberrations tend to attract the attention of the US government, which busted Vistas as part of a multibillion-dollar Medicare fraud investigation.

6Profiting From Dying Patients And Then Abandoning Them To Avoid Associated Costs

As we just observed, the best interests of the sick and dying sometimes take a backseat to the appeal of extended Medicare reimbursements. However, rather than blatantly lying about the condition of their patients like Vistas, many for-profit hospices opt for the more subtle approach of enrolling disproportionately high numbers of dementia sufferers, who sometimes live years longer than expected and—on average—require less care than other typical hospice patients.

The US government attempted to clamp down on this clandestine corruption by setting a $25,000 limit on the amount of money that hospices can receive without having to repay the government. However, numerous for-profit hospices nonetheless exceed their reimbursement caps by 50 percent or more. If they’re still in hot water, they can simply declare bankruptcy to avoid paying large debts, leaving ailing patients and their families to scramble for new providers while taxpayers foot the bill.

In a particularly striking case of this systematic abuse, Sojourn Care Inc. chose to close down after accruing $27 million in debt, then turned around and reopened under a different name. Consequently, the company was able to relinquish all previous legal obligations—which remained with the now defunct Sojourn Care—and then recruited the healthiest patients from its former incarnation in order to profit off them a bit longer. As a result, 180 of Sojourn Care’s 280 former patients were left to struggle, some dying in uncomfortable conditions as a result. The only thing more dispiriting is the fact that all of this is technically legal, meaning that for scores of families, justice may never be served.

5Conning Drug Addicts Into Entering Psychiatric Lockdown

Hardcore drug addicts are among the most desperate souls one can encounter in any society. Whether you sympathize with their struggles or chide them as harbingers of crime and social decay, there’s no denying that they lead lives of physical and mental enslavement at the hands of often deadly substances. So any efforts to help them break the chains of drug dependence should, in theory, be hailed as laudable endeavors.

But in Broward County, Florida, a group of executives overseeing a psychiatric hospital saw fit to provide a different kind of help for substance abusers. Over the course of nine years, the executives paid bribes and doctored documents all in the name of luring drug addicts to their hospital, the Hollywood Pavilion, where the addicts remained locked for weeks on end. But despite the glamorous connotations of its name, the Hollywood Pavilion was far from posh. Instead, patients were stuffed into insect-ridden rooms where they received little or no treatment and were kicked out as soon as their Medicare benefits had been exhausted.

After racking up $67 million in bogus reimbursements by offering empty promises of rehabilitation, the owners, Karen Kallen-Zury and Christian Coloma, received jail terms ranging from 12 to 25 years and were forced to pay millions in restitution. While none of these consequences can undo the injustices wrought against their victims, one can take some comfort in knowing that others in need of rehabilitation can’t be roped in by this toxic deception.

4Performing Fake Surgeries

One of the truly nightmarish aspects of surgery is the abject vulnerability of it. A patient must submit to drug-induced slumber so that a group of strangers can slice them open and proceed to poke, prod, and jostle their delicate innards. Were it not for the fact that this task was left up to highly trained experts, the surgeries would seem like blatant felonies. Unfortunately, some highly trained experts aren’t above behaving like felons.

Take, for example, Dr. Spyros Panos, an orthopedic surgeon at Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. Despite supposedly being fully capable of performing legitimate surgeries on his patients, it appears that the doctor opted to feign operations or perform them with the shoddiest of workmanship. A collection of 250 lawsuits filed by Panos’s former patients details how the surgeon performed excessive surgeries on some patients while not properly completing operations on others. In some cases, he sedated and opened up patients to give the illusion of surgery before sealing them right back up without making a single alteration.

Spanos’s exploits allowed him to schedule up to 22 surgeries per day, nearly 20 times the monthly average of his colleagues. And at least one of his dubious undertakings appears to have led to the death of a patient. While Panos has remained reticent about charges against him, his social media posts and personal blog ironically paint the picture of a doctor who takes patient care seriously. Fortunately for everyone, Spanos has since been convicted and has made a full confession.

3Recruiting The Homeless For Unnecessary Medical Treatment

By now, it’s abundantly clear that medical practitioners will sometimes travel great lengths down the path of dishonesty to make a few extra bucks. But we often expect that people who have dedicated themselves to saving lives will only go so far before succumbing to the pull of the angels on their shoulders. But if such a thing does occur, it certainly didn’t happen in California, where some of its most vulnerable citizens have been turned into fleshly ATM cards by hospital administrators.

A chain of Los Angeles-based medical facilities was caught enticing homeless people to submit to unnecessary medical testing. Lassoed in with miniscule bribes, homeless people were carted off to the hospital to receive second-rate treatment—or no treatment at all—before being loaded into ambulances and dumped in the famously seedy Skid Row. The bogus treatments were in turn billed to Medicaid. In one particularly horrifying instance, a homeless woman received a nitroglycerin patch for a fabricated illness, resulting in a dangerous drop in blood pressure.

All of this was made possible through a series of paid runners who collected and redeposited the homeless “patients.” The impromptu hospital visits accrued more than $16 million for the hospital chain. But the observant eye of Scott Johnson, an employee of Union Rescue Mission, caught on to the bizarre back-and-forth of makeshift homeless shuttles. After Johnson informed the police of the suspicious activity, a lengthy investigation busted the scheme wide open and led to a $16.5 million settlement.

2Unnecessary Chemo Treatments

Anyone with a passing knowledge of chemotherapy probably understands two things: It’s supposed to kill cancer, and the treatment’s side effects include hair loss and general anatomical misery. Because some chemo drugs can cause problems as severe as lung damage and permanent deafness, it’s imperative that the treatment only be administered when necessary.

But we live in a world rife with avoidable suffering, thanks in no small part to oncologist Farid Fata, whose litany of lies includes administering cancer drugs to people who didn’t have cancer. According to a complaint filed by the US government after a thorough FBI investigation, Dr. Fata issued $150 million worth of partially fraudulent Medicare bills over a three-year period. His chosen method of deception was to simply treat patients for the wrong illness or withhold valuable information about less costly alternatives. A nurse employed under Fata reported examining a chart of 40 of his patients and discovering that 95 percent of them were being improperly treated.

In some cases, Fata would write prescriptions for lifelong drug treatment even though curative surgeries were available. But the most shocking infractions involved his willingness to falsely diagnose patients with cancer in order to profit off the ensuing tests and chemotherapy. After finally being apprehended by authorities in 2013, Fata faces massive fines and a decade-long prison sentence.

1Performing Unnecessary, Life-Threatening Surgeries On The Elderly

Like all of the other facilities on this list, Sacred Heart was the site of systematic Medicare fraud at the expense of patients. To perpetrate this multimillion-dollar fraud, hospital administrators not only paid kickbacks to have patients artificially referred to them, but also had ambulances deliver patients to the emergency room to force automatic Medicare billing. They also artificially extended hospital stays and subjected elderly patients to unnecessary operations—sometimes with fatal results.

One of the hospital’s most wanton offenders, Dr. Vittorio Guerriero, reportedly induced breathing complications in at least 28 patients, at which point tracheotomies were required. In the course of performing these invasive procedures, which required holes to be drilled into the victims’ throats, five people died. The entire operation was so corrupt that Sacred Heart was forced to shut down after the authorities seized its financial assets.

A.C. Grimes is not a healthcare professional and can therefore be trusted. Feel free to check out some of his other writings on Cracked.com .

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The human brain is amazing. In the words of neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, it’s a “three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand,” but it can “contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.” As it’s the most complex organ in our bodies, you can bet there’s no shortage of strange stories about the human brain.

10 Brains On eBay

Here’s a story with all the makings of a Gothic novel, complete with a mental hospital, human organs, and a ghoulish grave robber named David Charles.

Charles didn’t actually dig up any coffins, but he did break into the Indiana Medical History Museum on several occasions. From the 1840s right up to the 1990s, the museum was the site of the Central State Hospital, a psychiatric ward that performed its fair share of autopsies. After the bodies were cut up, the brains were jarred and locked away in a warehouse—a warehouse Charles later slipped into repeatedly.

After pilfering six jars of human tissue, Charles unloaded his goods to an eBay fence who sold them to a San Diego man for $600. The buyer liked “to collect odd things.” He also had a code of ethics. While he didn’t mind breaking federal law by buying human organs, and while he didn’t care about violating eBay policies on body parts, he did have problems with buying stolen property. Neither Charles nor his eBay middleman had the brains to remove the museum labels from the jars.

Figuring something crooked was going on, the San Diego buyer notified authorities. After tracking down the eBay seller, Indianapolis police officers set up a sting operation. The plan was for Charles, who’d recently snatched 60 more brains, to meet up with his eBay buddy at a local Dairy Queen. And on December 16, cops swarmed the restaurant parking lot, successfully bringing down the Indiana Igor.

9 The Cordless Drill Skull Operation

Marian Dolishny was dying. Thanks to a fair-sized tumor, he was suffering epileptic seizures, and if he didn’t do something about it soon, he’d go blind. Unfortunately for Dolishny, he couldn’t just visit the local hospital and schedule an operation. It was 2007, Dolishny lived in Ukraine, and due to a labyrinthine bureaucracy and massive underfunding, the healthcare system was a mess. No one could remove his tumor, and things were looking grim when suddenly an elderly British superhero showed up to save the day.

One of the UK’s best neurosurgeons, Henry Marsh had been visiting Ukraine at least twice a year since the early ‘90s. After meeting people with massive growths on their heads, Marsh realized he couldn’t fly back home and forget what he’d seen. So he sent disused supplies from his hospital in Tooting to Ukrainian doctors. Even better, he started offering his services free of charge.

That’s how Marsh and Dolishny met. But just because the Ukrainian had a great surgeon didn’t mean the operation was going to be easy. Marsh lacked access to the state-of-the-art equipment required for such procedures. However, the best doctors are like musicians—they’re talented, passionate, and can improvise on the fly. Marsh went to a local store and bought a $67 cordless power drill. He then operated with a gadget you keep in your toolbox.

What’s even crazier is Dolishny was awake for the whole thing. No qualified anesthetists were around, so Marsh just used a local anesthetic. And since Dolishny was awake, Marsh talked to him the entire time, making sure he wasn’t screwing up the man’s brain.

Before Marsh could finish the procedure, the drill’s battery died. Where a lesser surgeon would’ve panicked, Marsh kept on working, finishing up with his gloved hands and saving Dolishny’s life.

8 Strange Stories Of Ancient Brains

Your brain is 60 percent fat, and thanks to all that blubber, it’s the first organ to melt away after you die. That’s why archaeologists find so many skulls but so few brains. Most of them liquefied long before we could dig them up.

But every so often, scientists discover a brain dating back several thousand years. For example, the some of the oldest brain tissue ever discovered, around 8,000 years old, was found in eastern Florida, preserved under thick layers of peat. But while they’re not as old as their New World counterparts, the ancient brains of Europe carry much more interesting stories.

Our first macabre tale is the story of the Heslington Brain, the oldest known brain in Great Britain. In 2008, the University of York was expanding its campus when someone stumbled over several pits dating back to the Iron Age. After prodding around, archaeologists found one hole containing a skull, a jaw, and two neck vertebrae belonging to the same deceased Brit. When the skull was opened, scientists found the yellowy, shrunken remains of a 2,500-year-old brain. The muddy environment had kept it safe from decay. Marks on the vertebrae indicate that the body’s owner had been hanged and beheaded, possibly as part of a ritualistic murder.

Only slightly less morbid is the tale of the 4,000-year-old Turkish brain found in the Bronze Age settlement of Seyitomer Hoyuk. This brain looks like a charred log someone pulled out of a bonfire. That’s probably because it belonged to an unfortunate Turk who was minding his or her own business when an earthquake wrecked the entire village, bringing down a rain of rubble. Then, a fire broke out, incinerating everything and boiling said brain in its own juices. But while a bubbling brain sounds disgusting, this rapid evaporation of liquid coupled with nutrient-rich soil and elimination of oxygen via the flames ensured this charbroiled organ survived for thousands of years.

7 Unlocking Lenin’s Brain

Vladimir Lenin was a prolific writer and a serious philosopher. He also successfully overthrew a government and installed himself as unquestioned dictator. But was he a genius? Soviet scientists certainly thought so.

After the Premier died in 1924, Russian researchers were itching to cut open his skull and study his brain. They wanted to show the world Lenin was one of the smartest men on the planet. So after removing the brain, they plunked it in a jar of formaldehyde and stuck it in the V.I. Lenin Institute while they searched for the right expert to examine the organ. Two years later, they decided Oskar Vogt was the man for the job. The only problem was Vogt was German, and the Soviets didn’t want Lenin’s brain leaving Moscow.

In a typical Soviet compromise, officials gave Vogt one little sample to take back home. If he wanted to see the rest of the brain, he had to come to Russia. So for the next several years, Vogt visited the Moscow Brain Institute, but some Soviets weren’t too happy with this foreigner fondling their comrade’s cerebrum. Even worse, Vogt was telling people Lenin’s brain resembled a criminal’s.

Ticked off, the Soviets planned to fly to Berlin and take back the sliver of brain they’d lent the man, but Adolf Hitler fired Vogt from his position before the Russians could get their sample back. Nobody knows what happened to that little piece of Vladimir’s brain.

The Soviets cut the rest up into tiny chunks and dyed the pieces different colors. After the fall of the USSR, Russian scientists released a paper detailing the results of their nearly 70-year-long study. They had found nothing interesting at all.

6 The Woman Who Remembers Everything

Can you remember where you were on a randomly selected date 30 years ago? Say, the afternoon of September 20, 1985? Assuming you were even alive then, chances are good you’re drawing a blank, but Jill Price remembers that day perfectly. She was wearing a big hat and eating garlic chicken with her dad at one of her favorite restaurants. And if you picked some other random day, she could do the same exact same thing because Jill Price remembers everything.

Jill has a rare condition called hyperthymestic syndrome, which gives her a super-powered memory. While scientists are still trying to understand Jill’s mind, they believe her elephantine memory has something do with several areas of her brain that are three times bigger than average.

Thanks to her special brain, Jill can remember most everything that happened between her 9th and 15th birthday. And after that? She couldn’t forget anything if she tried. But strangely, if you asked her to memorize a poem, she probably couldn’t do it. Jill’s semantic memory isn’t all that strong, but her episodic memory, the part that remembers personal events and emotions, is perfect. And that’s actually a big problem.

In addition to remembering cool facts, Jill remembers every terrible event that’s ever happened to her as though it happened yesterday. That’s especially hard when Jill thinks about loved ones who’ve passed away or things people did years ago. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance,” she once said. “It’s like an endless chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

5 How Hugo Rewired A Man’s Brain

Photo credit: Paramount Pictures

Imagine the world as a flat, 2-D panel. There is no depth perception here. When pouring a glass of water and looking from above, you wouldn’t know it was full until the water spilled over. Trees would be nothing more than flat patterns blending into the background. This is the world Bruce Bridgeman lived in for 67 years until Martin Scorsese changed his life.

Bridgeman is a neuroscientist at the University of California, and until 2012, he was one of the 5–10 percent of the population suffering from stereoblindness, the inability to see three-dimensionally. In Bridgeman’s case, his impairment was caused by alternating exotropic strabismus. In other words, his eyes wandered around independently. Since he could only focus one eyeball at a time, he could never see out both eyes at once, eliminating all depth perception.

Then in 2012, everything changed. Bridgeman and his wife went to see Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 3-D. Even though it wouldn’t do him any good, Bridgeman bought the glasses and settled in for the picture. And once the film started, images popped out of the screen. Suddenly, everything was vivid and alive. Objects and people actually stood out from the background.

What was even more amazing is when Bridgeman went outside, he could still see in 3-D. The lampposts were no longer part of the background, and a tree was suddenly a “big three-dimensional sculpture.”

Scientists think Bridgeman always had the ability to see 3-D, but his brain just needed a wake-up call. As he stared at the screen for 128 minutes, his eyes focused on the movie, and suddenly his visual cortex just clicked.

Obviously, the 3-D movie cure doesn’t work for everyone. Some need corrective surgery, some spend hours in therapy, and others will never see the world in its full glory.

4 The Man Who Could Only Say One Syllable

Born in 1809, Louis Victor Leborgne struggled with epilepsy for years before things got even worse. At the age of 30, Leborgne lost the ability to speak. He could say just one syllable: “tan.” If you asked for his name, he’d say, “Tan tan.” If you asked him his favorite food, he’d say, “Tan, tan.” If you asked him the time, he’d say “Tan tan,” but he’d show you the correct time using his fingers. Louis Leborgne wasn’t stupid. He just couldn’t talk.

Unable to communicate, Leborgne checked in to a Parisian hospital, where he spent the next 21 years of his life. He morphed into a rather disagreeable person. He’d monosyllabically argue with staff and even steal on occasion. If Leborgne got especially angry, he could toss around a few swear words, though he could never curse when calm and composed.

Things got worse when his right arm and leg suddenly became paralyzed. Frustrated, Leborgne stayed in bed for seven years, and in 1861, he developed a horrible case of gangrene in his right side. Hoping to save Leborgne, the hospital brought in surgeon Paul Broca. The operation came too late, and Lebornge died on April 17, aged 51. However, his brain still had an important part to play in the world of neuroscience.

After examining Leborgne’s brain, Broca discovered a nasty lesion in the frontal area of the left hemisphere, a region later dubbed Broca’s area. After performing additional biopsies on similar patients, the doctor knew he was on to something big. For a while, scientists had been debating whether individual parts of the brain controlled specific functions. Now, Broca had proof that the front left hemisphere was responsible for language.

It also seemed the area was divided into multiple regions serving different functions, like language production and language comprehension. That explained why Leborgne could understand as many words as anyone else though he could only pronounce one.

Broca was right on the money, and his discovery revolutionized neurology. Leborgne’s brain now floats in a jar at the Musee Dupuytren in Paris, where anyone can come and visit it.

3 Brain Teeth And Brain Feet

Early in 2014, a four-month-old Maryland baby made headlines thanks to a rather unusual brain tumor. During an operation, surgeons found the baby had a craniopharyngioma, a growth created by the same cells that make our teeth. There were actual teeth growing in the baby’s brain. Doctors safely removed the toothy tumor, but this wasn’t the first case of its kind.

In 2008, Colorado doctors discovered Tiffinie Esquibel’s unborn baby Sam was suffering from a brain tumor. After inducing labor, the doctors took Sam into surgery, and what happened next sounds like a scene from a horror movie. When Dr. Paul Grabb cut open the tumor, a human foot popped out of Sam’s head. When the surgeons got over their shock, they dug a little deeper and actually found a hand and even a thigh.

Most doctors believe Sam was suffering from a teratoma, a tumor that often produces creepy body parts in places they don’t belong. As awful as that sounds, it’s way more comforting than the other theory doctors considered. A few suspected Sam might have a condition known as fetus in fetu, meaning he might have absorbed a twin in the womb, and his sibling was feeding off Sam like a human parasite.

2 The Man Who Loves Johnny Cash

“Mr. B” is a 59-year-old Dutchman who’s battled severe OCD for 40 years. Desperate for a cure, he agreed to try deep brain stimulation, a treatment involving surgical implants that zap the brain with electric currents.

Just as Mr. B had hoped, the shock therapy worked, greatly reducing his OCD, depression, and anxiety. However, the treatment had a really weird side effect. It turned him into the world’s biggest Johnny Cash fan. Before the surgery, Mr. B was a casual music listener who liked Dutch music, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. But after the treatment, Mr. B bought every Johnny Cash CD and DVD he could get his hands on. He won’t listen to anything else.

Scientists know the implants are responsible because every time their batteries start to die, Mr. B stops listening to his Johnny Cash albums. Yet as soon as doctors recharge the implants, he starts walking the line again, devoting himself solely to the Man in Black.

1 The Family That Can’t Fall Asleep

Italian physician Ignazio Roiter married into an old Venetian family, but unbeknownst to the good doctor, there was something horrifying about the clan’s history. Roiter’s first glimpse of the familial terror came in 1973, when his wife’s aunt developed an inexplicable sickness. All of a sudden, she couldn’t fall asleep. Soon, she was stuck in an agonizing limbo between unconsciousness and waking life. Completely exhausted but unable to rest, she lost the ability to walk and gave up on conversation until she died a year later.

In 1979, another aunt died of the same mysterious disease. Suddenly, someone remembered an old grandfather who’d passed away under similar circumstances. Curious, Roiter scoured records at the local church and nearby mental asylum. After finding multiple instances of relatives dying sleepless deaths, he was convinced a genetic disease was at work. And when an uncle named Silvano died of fatigue in 1984, Roiter got a chance to find out for sure.

Roiter took the man’s brain to two American specialists. After analyzing the organ, Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti found the brain was full of tiny holes. According to a second doctor named Stanley Prusiner, a mutant gene had activated a group of misinformed proteins called prions. These rogue molecules took on virus characteristics and started infecting other proteins, turning the brain into a war zone and shutting down important bodily functions like sleep.

There’s no cure for fatal familial insomnia. If that mutant gene activates the abnormal proteins, the carrier is doomed to a sleepless haze. As of 2010, scientists have found at least 40 families battling this illness. Until scientists do cure the disorder, people like Roiter’s relatives will never rest—not until that final big sleep.

Nolan Moore would dance and be merry, his life would be a ding-a-derry, if he only had a brain. If you want, you can follow/friend him on Facebook or send him an email.

We have something of a love-hate relationship with fast food. Many of us happily stop at a drive-through when we need something in a hurry, but we still sneer at the food and look at it with suspicion. We fear constantly eating food that was made in a commercial kitchen, and the speed with which it’s prepared implies that it was made without care. The megalith of commercialized, super-quick food production leaves many nostalgic for the good old days, when you knew exactly where your food came from and what was in it.

While eating fast food may not always be the healthiest option, and we certainly can’t guarantee the safety of our food if we don’t prepare it ourselves, many rumors of the fast food industry’s incompetence are greatly overstated.

10The Incorruptible Hamburger

People have an odd belief that mass-produced food is literally made of industrial chemicals meant more for paint stripping than eating. This has led to the even odder belief that fast food hamburgers never decay. What makes this myth particularly weird is that despite being one of the most pervasive myths about food, it is also one of the easiest to debunk. Anyone can buy a burger and watch it decompose over time, but the myth has only recently seen serious busting.

McDonald’s Canada was asked about the “incorruptible McDonald’s hamburger,” and the company decided to finally kill this silly rumor. A spokesman admitted that the company’s burgers do tend to dry out rather than rot, but that’s not because they’re laden with chemicals. The burgers simply don’t have much moisture in them after the cooking process, and leaving them in the open air removes even more. In properly moist conditions, a McDonald’s burger would rot just like any other food.

An independent study by a food blogger found that under similar conditions, McDonald’s fare rots at the same rate as homemade burgers.

9Fast Food Restaurants Are Less Healthy Than Dine-In Establishments

You’ve decided that you want to take the family out to eat, but you want to feel good about the food you’re shoveling into their starving mouths. You decide that you should go to a sit-down restaurant, since those places clearly offer much healthier options than the local McDonald’s. Unfortunately for your family, you may have made the wrong choice.

A Drexel study examined full-service restaurant menus, and the results were not at all pleasant. While a combo meal at a burger joint has more calories than you need for one meal, a full meal at a sit-down restaurant may have more than you need in an entire day.

The researchers defined a meal for an adult as an entree with a side and half of an appetizer, along with the free bread often offered. The average full meal at a sit-down place hit about 1,500 calories and went well over the daily recommended limit for saturated fat and sodium content. If you throw in a drink and half of a dessert, the average restaurant meal puts you over your daily recommended caloric intake. If you want to make sure you are getting a healthy option, you may just need to cook it yourself.

8Taco Bell’s Seasoned Beef Is Only 35 Percent Meat

A few years back, a rumor arose saying only 35 percent (or another disturbingly small percentage) of Taco Bell seasoned beef is meat, the meat is Grade D, it’s unfit for humans, and it’s somehow still allowed to be sold to massive numbers of people. The rumor’s roots go to an Alabama lawsuit, which was thrown out of court because it was complete and utter nonsense.

To address the rumors, Taco Bell explained that their seasoned beef is 88 percent beef and 12 percent filler, which may sound less than ideal, but that’s comparable to its competitors’ recipes. The website containing this explanation also gave fun explanations for some of the more obscure components, such as “Trehalose,” which they use for sweetening purposes.

Certain paranoid people will continue to fear Taco Bell’s chemical ingredients like “maltodextrin,” but actual chemists laugh off these worries—the ingredients are all very much safe and edible.

7McDonald’s Frozen Desserts Use Pig Fat And No Dairy

McDonald’s calls their frozen treats “thickshakes” or just “shakes,” rather than “milkshakes.” Some people noticing this choice concluded the drink can’t be a proper milkshake at all. In fact, it probably contains no dairy whatsoever. From there, it wasn’t long before people started coming up with theories as to what McDonald’s was using instead. People proposed all sorts of fillers, from pig fat to cow eyeball fluid to Styrofoam balls to bird feathers.

It’s true that the treats don’t use real ice cream, which is why McDonald’s doesn’t call them “milkshakes.” Instead, they use a premade mix—one that does contain dairy. Making actual ice cream shakes fresh on a massive scale day in and day out would be hard to manage logistically.

You may choose not to drink their shakes if you don’t like the taste, but for those of you who do, there isn’t anything out of the ordinary to worry about, aside from how fattening they are.

6The Salads Are A Healthy Option

Salads seem the healthiest option when eating fast food. They’re made of vegetables, after all, which surely have to be better for you than greasy burgers and fries. In reality, however, the salad option contains so much cheese, dressing, or meat that they’re as bad as anything else on the menu.

The Consumerist looked at several fast food chains and found that the salads have as many calories as other menu items. Even worse, salads often contain more fat, more sugar, and oftentimes an absolutely whopping pile of sodium. While salad may sometimes be a healthy option, when you buy it from a burger joint, it probably isn’t.

5Fast Food Is Cheap

One of the most pervasive myths about fast food, as well as junk food in general, is that it’s far less pricey than healthier alternatives. This explanation is often used by people incredulous that anyone would willingly choose junk if better food is cheaper or comparatively priced. But while fast food is certainly cheap compared with other sorts of restaurants, it’s downright expensive compared with what you prepare at home, even when you cook far higher-quality food.

NY Times food columnist Mark Bittman notes that the average McDonald’s combo meal costs about $7, adding up to $28 to feed a family of four. You could feed the family an entire chicken dinner at home for roughly half the cost, and you’ll be giving them a much healthier plate.

On the other hand, cooking food yourself does have a cost of its own. It takes time, and it takes effort. Fast food is undeniably the more convenient choice, which is why people will continue to pick it. But if you have the time and energy, eating at home is a much better option in every way.

4White Castle’s Bait-And-Switch Onions

You may not live in an area with a White Castle, but you may know of it from a certain movie where two guys try really hard to get to one. For those still unfamiliar with the chain, White Castle’s miniature burgers are famous for being incredibly cheap and, anecdotally, for giving indigestion a few hours after eating them. Fans also know the restaurant for its trademark steamed meat that always comes with onions because onions are just that important. For some reason, rumors say that White Castle is pulling a bait-and-switch with one of their most cherished ingredients.

The rumors state that White Castle onions are actually pieces of cabbage soaked in onion juice. It would seem one of the strangest and most pointless things that a fast food restaurant could do, but enough people believe the rumor that White Castle actually responds to it on their website.

Their burgers contain no cabbage and do indeed have real onions—although the restaurant admits to using rehydrated onions ever since World War II.

3Arby’s Roast Beef Is Made From A Gel

This weird rumor says Arby’s roast beef arrives at the store in a liquid gel form inside a sealed plastic bag. The congealed mixture is heated till it becomes sliceable and is then served to the poor, naive customer. Unlike some rumors, this one has understandable origins, but it’s still wholly false.

The fact-checkers at Snopes talked to several people who worked at actual Arby’s restaurants and learned the source of the confusion. The meat arrives at the store inside airtight plastic bags, with a thin layer of basting solution that looks like a gel. This could easily lead a new employee who hasn’t yet cut into the bag and roasted the beef to think they were looking at a lumpy, gelatinous mess. You may or may not find Arby’s food particularly appetizing, but rest assured that it’s actual beef.

2McDonald’s Egg Patties Come Pre-Formed

The uniform circular shape of McDonald’s Egg McMuffin patties look so perfect that people think it’s some artificial substance sent to the restaurant in readymade shapes. However, when McDonald’s in Canada was asked about this question, they responded by supplying a video of how the egg process actually works.

The eggs really are just eggs, and that perfect shape is achieved by cooking them using a ring mold, a method almost elegant in its simplicity. The scrambled eggs are slightly more questionable, as they are made with a liquid egg mix and cooked with margarine, but they still do contain actual egg.

1Darker Roasted Coffee Contains More Caffeine

One of the most common misconceptions among those who head to Starbucks or order coffee at a burger joint is that bolder, blacker coffee is stronger and gives a more intense buzz. But if you’re looking for the strongest possible caffeine hit, you should purchase a lighter roasted coffee.

Coffee beans start out green and become darker due to the roasting process. As the roasting process continues, you also end up losing more caffeine, so darker roasts have less than their lighter counterparts.

The best way to truly increase your caffeine buzz in the morning is to add a shot or two of espresso to your coffee, something that most cafes will happily do for you.

Gregory is eating fast food right now. Don’t judge him.

You may think that the elderly are inferior in every way and do nothing but drag society down. Well, get ready to throw all preconceptions out the window as research shows us just how awesome they really are.

10They Handle Stress Better Than Young People

Contrary to our view of elderly people as cranky old coots, findings say they actually exhibit a more optimistic outlook on life than their younger peers. Not only that, they can deal with stressful life events far better, readily accepting the outcome with less anger or anxiety.

Researcher Mary Shallcross explains these findings by noting that people acquire a wealth of experience in dealing with life’s unpleasantness over time. Thus, the older a person becomes, the more readily they accept the outcome of unpleasant events such as the deaths of loved ones.

However, this ability reaches its end with truly advanced age. In the final years of life, emotional health deteriorates.

9Overweight Seniors Live Longer

The elderly, just like everyone else, should strive to be healthy. But according to an Ohio State University study, older adults (especially those in their fifties) are actually better off with a few extra pounds on their waistlines.

Assistant sociology professor Hui Zheng found that slightly heavier adults outlive their slimmer peers of the same age range. Older people are more susceptible to disease and its accompanying weight loss. The few extra pounds could help stave off a potentially life-threatening loss of weight. Not only that, the extra weight would serve as a sort of emergency food supply for old people too sick to eat.

However, Zheng warns that the benefits apply only to slightly overweight people who maintain their weight. Overweight people who continue to pack on the pounds as they grow even older risk dying a lot earlier.

8Nostalgia Is Therapeutic

Ever had that grandpa or grandma who keeps telling you stories about the “good ol’ days?” If so, we’d forgive you for a natural hatred of nostalgia. Defined as a melancholic reflection on past events, nostalgia acquired a bad rap originally. It was first viewed as a medical disease in the 17th century and then a psychiatric disorder in the 20th century. However, modern researchers have found that nostalgia is actually beneficial, especially for the elderly.

University of Southampton psychologist Constantine Sedikide, notes that modern researchers are just really beginning to find out the psychological benefits of nostalgia. For one, it can help to battle the effects of loneliness, increasing an individual’s self-esteem. It can also serve as a bridge from the past to the present, keeping people in touch with reality and giving meaning to their lives.

7Old People Helped Mankind Evolve

The elderly have been instrumental to mankind’s evolution. According to anthropologist Rachel Caspari and her colleague Sang-Hee Lee, human evolution took a huge leap forward more than 30,000 years ago, specifically during a certain time period that saw a four-fold increase in the number of people going into old age.

Although the exact cause still remains unclear, the anthropologists speculate that the population explosion occurred when people decided to keep the old folks around to tend to their children and homes while the parents were out hunting and gathering. As a result, the survival rate of the elderly increased substantially.

With more and more old people settling down together, ideas and experiences could be shared and exchanged, resulting in a significant spread of information that would be felt by future generations. As Lee puts it, old people became the figurative computer hard drives for early mankind.

6They Still Get Plenty Of Sex

The idea that old people live a sex-free life couldn’t be any further from the truth. According to a 2013 study done in the US, the elderly enjoy far more sexy time than any of us would have ever imagined. For example, more than 50 percent of interviewees belonging to the 57–75 age bracket reported giving or receiving oral sex, while one-third of those in the 75–85 range reported indulging in the act.

As significant as the study was for breaking stereotypes, it also opened a can of worms: elderly STDs. According to the CDC, the number of geriatrics acquiring STDs has risen since 2007, mainly because of lack of education in using safety measures. Public health expert Emmanuel Ezekiel encourages health professionals to assist the elderly with sex education since sex comes naturally for people living in close proximity (in retirement homes, for example).

5Their Driving Has Improved Greatly

Good news to all users of the road: A 2012 study by the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that accidents and crashes involving older drivers have significantly decreased in the last decade. Those who do get in accidents are now far more likely to survive with fewer injuries.

Since 1997, older driver fatalities have dropped by 42 percent, supported with a similar decrease in non-fatal incidents. For the Institute, this was a surprising find, since they expected that the ever-increasing elderly population would create more accidents on the road.

This positive trend could be attributed to modern cars being generally safer than previous models. Another critical factor is the improving physical and mental health of the elderly, which have helped to curb the number of accidents.

4They Could Be The Key To World Peace

The Roman Empire had a long period of peace called the Pax Romana, and some say that we’ll soon have our own version, thanks to our elderly.

Mark Haas from Harvard’s International Security Program notes that a rapidly aging population will force the United States to spend more of its budget on pensions and healthcare for the elderly instead of on tanks and aircraft. The foreseeable future will still see the US as the dominant economic and military power because rival countries including Russia and China will be hit even harder by the aging trend.

Supporters of the US’s current foreign policy say that the forced “Pax Geriatrica” will have its downsides. The US will be less able to police the world and intervene in localized conflicts. Decreased military and security spending could also leave the US more vulnerable to renegade terrorist attacks.

3Our Genes Command Us To Respect Them

We don’t just respect our elders out of good manners and maturity. We may be programmed to.

In 2010, France’s University of Rennes closely observed communication habits among a group of Campbell’s monkeys. The team noted that that older monkeys who called out tended to be answered more often, even though they communicated far less often than the younger ones. This indicated that the older monkeys—because of their greater experience in survival and higher rank in the social hierarchy—were far more influential in the group, leading younger monkeys to pay more attention to them.

Some may interpret the findings as a sociological phenomenon rather than a biological one, and some may think the results only extend to the study subjects. But the researchers conclude that respect for elders is as an evolutionary trait, which may be found generally in all primates, including humans.

2Their Brains Work Slower (Only Because They’re Full Of Wisdom)

While we young whippersnappers crack jokes at how excruciatingly slowly old people think and speak, they only do that because their brains have stored so much information. Combined with the fact that their brains need less dopamine than before, old people are also more thoughtful and far less likely to act on impulse than their younger peers. The elderly can still process new information, albeit at a slower pace for the same reason that they speak slowly.

These unique characteristics of an aging brain make up what researchers believe to be the biological root of wisdom. As University of Dallas Center for Vital Longevity’s Denise Park summarizes, “There’s a reason why we don’t have 20-year-olds running the world.”

1Older Workers Outperform Younger Peers

To learn how often cognitive performance fluctuates among workers, Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development divided participants into two groups based on their age range (20–31 and 65–80). All participants performed a series of cognitive tasks repeatedly for 100 days.

The older group’s cognitive performance varied much less than those in the younger group. In other words, they did their work more consistently. The researchers attributed the old workers’ steady performance to their being more emotionally stable as well as being more experienced to handle the various tasks.

Marc V. is always open for a conversation, so do drop him a line sometime.

Everyone looks forward to heading out on vacation. Despite the hassles—crowds, delays, bad weather, bad food, that hotel that looks nothing like the pictures—travel can be one of the best experiences of a lifetime. But sometimes things go really wrong and affect people’s lives forever. Here are 10 stories of people who set out on vacation and came back with a harrowing tale to tell—or never came back at all.

10 Erin Langworthy

Visiting Victoria Falls in southern Africa is a dream for many, but for 22-year-old Erin Langworthy, it turned into a nightmare. The Australian was bungee jumping off the Victoria Falls Bridge while visiting Zambia in 2012 when the cord snapped and she plunged 111 meters (364 ft) into the crocodile-infested Zambesi River below. She was swept down the swollen river, her feet still bound together by 10 meters (30 ft) of rope, and spent 40 minutes in the water, until she finally managed to grab onto some rocks and an employee of the bungee company pulled her onto the river bank.

Langworthy was taken to Victoria Falls Clinic in Zimbabwe, but didn’t reach the clinic until five and a half hours after her jump. Though her lungs were partially collapsed and her body was covered in bruises, Langworthy didn’t suffer any serious injuries and returned home two weeks later. She had been the 106th person to jump off the bridge that day.

9Daniel Dudzisz

A 26-year-old German tourist went missing this year while attempting to walk almost halfway across Australia alone. He survived by eating flies. Daniel Dudzisz had been homeless for two years and had taken to walking long distances on his own. He had planned to walk 3,860 kilometers (2,400 mi) from New South Wales to Uluru, but found himself lost and stranded between two flooded banks of a river for 10 days. News of his disappearance didn’t alarm those who had encountered Dudzisz; opal miner Andrew Plax said Dudzisz was a uniquely tough traveler who had walked enormous distances on other continents, drinking water from troughs and puddles, and “could live off the smell of an oily rag.” He had no doubt the missing hiker would be found alive.

Dudzisz, who is diabetic, fortunately had enough insulin with him. He turned to eating flies for nutrients when his small supply of cereal and baked beans ran out, and he was eventually rescued by a passing motorist. Dudzisz refused medical treatment and was determined to finish his walk, though he promised to stick to main roads and only walk during daylight hours.

8 Rochelle Harris

British tourist Rochelle Harris was on a flight back from a holiday in Peru in 2013 when she began experiencing a powerful headache and shooting pains in her face. She also began hearing strange scratching noises and had a discharge from her ear. On returning home, 27-year-old Harris paid a visit to a doctor. After initially blaming an ear infection, doctors soon discovered eight large maggots wriggling around inside Harris’s ear canal. She remembered walking through a swarm of flies while hiking on her vacation and one had been buzzing in her ear, but once she waved the fly away, she thought nothing more of it. The insect was a “new world screw-worm fly,” which generally lay their larvae in the wounds of warm-blooded animals. Once they hatched 24 hours later, the maggots chewed a 12-millimeter (half inch) hole in Rochelle Harris’s ear canal. The ordeal didn’t cause any permanent damage to Harris and, surprisingly, the incident made her less squeamish about bugs.

7 Keith Brown

British youth worker Keith Brown was traveling to London from Ethiopia with his wife when he was detained by customs officers while connecting in Dubai. He was found to have cannabis on his person, was arrested on drug possession charges, and was sentenced to four years in prison. He had 0.003 grams (0.0001 oz) of cannabis stuck to the bottom of his shoe. This is about the size of a grain of sugar—not nearly enough to have any psychotropic effect. Fortunately for the 43-year-old father of three, he was pardoned and released early on in his sentence. The UAE is notoriously tough and unyielding on drug crime—a German national was imprisoned for carrying over-the-counter jet lag pills that are legal in Dubai, and a Swiss traveler was reportedly jailed for having poppy seeds on his clothing after eating a bread roll at Heathrow Airport.

6 Brittanee Drexel

In 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel told her mother she was spending spring break no more than 32 kilometers (20 mi) from their home in Rochester, New York. Instead, she headed to the party town of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with her boyfriend and friends. While there, she went to the Blue Water Hotel to visit a friend who was staying there. She stayed about 10 minutes, then walked out of the hotel lobby at 9:00 PM, never to be seen again. Surveillance cameras caught her entering and leaving the Blue Water, but offered no other clues.

The following day, her cell phone signal disappeared. The signal was later tracked to a swampy area, sparking even greater fears for Brittanee’s safety. The area was searched extensively, but nothing was ever discovered. Police interviewed the friend she had visited at the Blue Water Hotel, who had somewhat suspiciously returned home to Rochester that night at 2:00 AM, and searched the room of a person of interest at another hotel, but no concrete evidence or trace of Brittanee Drexel was ever found. Brittanee’s mother eventually moved from Rochester to Myrtle Beach to feel closer to her daughter and to stay involved in the investigation.

5 The Lutes Family

Widower Gary Lutes wanted to share his love of caving with his two sons, Buddy (age 13) and Tim (age 9). In June 1990, he drove with the boys from their home in Florida to explore the New Trout Cave in West Virginia. They set off into the cave wearing headlamps and carrying a pack of supplies including food, water, and extra headlamps. After 305 meters (1,000 ft), they reached a section known as “The Maze,” full of jagged rocks and tight spaces. Fearing the pack would become a hindrance, Lutes left it behind, intending to return in the half hour he estimated they had left in their headlamps.

After only a few minutes, the boys’ lamps burned out. Lutes decided to return to the pack, but soon realized they were lost. Lutes’s lamp died and the family was plunged into darkness. Gary and the boys were trapped in the cave for five days with no food, water, or light. They began hallucinating, retching from the soot left over from past mining operations in the cave, and Gary developed chest pains. On the fifth day, the family was rescued after a nearby resident alerted authorities that the car had been parked outside the cave for days.

The National Cave Rescue Association questioned why Lutes carried just one pack into the cave only to leave it behind and said that as an experienced caver, he should have known better: “This rescue should never have taken place. Gary Lutes violated every rule that the NSS and the rest of organized caving preaches to each and every one of us: Carry three sources of light each! Tell someone where you are caving and when you will return!”

4Sidney Good And Alexis Fairchild

While vacationing in Florida, two 17-year-old teens from Indiana were seriously injured while parasailing in a horrific incident that was caught on video. As wind speeds increased due to an incoming storm, the operator of the boat made an attempt to bring the girls down—only to have the rope snap, leaving Sidney and Alexis strapped in and at the mercy of strong winds. Horrified onlookers saw them sail overheard, screaming, heading straight for an apartment building. They slammed into a balcony, where building residents tried to grab onto them, but the wind was too strong. They hit nearby power lines and crashed into a parking lot, landing on a windshield and shattering it.

Sidney Good suffered brain trauma and cracked vertebrae and will suffer long-term health issues including vision problems. Alexis Fairchild had a broken back, head trauma, and serious lacerations, presumably from the car windshield. The incident sparked fury at the lack of safety regulations for water sports companies.

3 Cheznye Emmons

While traveling in Indonesia with her boyfriend, 23-year-old British beauty therapist Cheznye Emmons had to be rushed out of the jungle when she fell seriously ill and was unable to see. Arriving at the nearest hospital five hours later, she was put into an induced coma. Emmons, her boyfriend, and a friend had purchased a bottle of alcohol from a local shop with an original label reading “Gin” and had several drinks. It was later discovered that the gin had been removed and replaced with cheaper home-brewed methanol, which can cause seizures, kidney failure, blindness, and death. Five days after the incident, when it became clear that Emmons would never recover, her parents made the heartbreaking decision to turn off their daughter’s life support. The store was investigated and shut down. Potent home-brewed alcohol is a serious problem in Indonesia—in 2009, 25 people died in Bali after drinking a local spirit tainted with methanol.

2 Azaria Chamberlain

In 1980, the Chamberlain family was camping at Uluru (then known as Ayer’s Rock) as part of a large group. As night fell, Lindy Chamberlain placed her nine-week-old daughter Azaria into their tent. Some time later, screams erupted as Lindy discovered Azaria missing, blood on the tent, and dingo tracks nearby. The initial finding in 1981 was that Azaria had in fact been taken and presumably killed by the wild dogs. However, authorities and the public found it difficult to believe that the animals would come into a camp and attack without provocation and so suspicion fell onto the parents. The next year, Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of the murder of her daughter and sentenced to life in prison while her husband Michael was charged as an accessory.

Lindy served three years in prison, until Azaria’s bloody jacket was found near a dingo lair and she was pardoned and released. In 2012, after extensive investigation bolstered by reports of other attacks by dingoes on children, a coroner finally ruled that a dingo was responsible for Azaria Chamberlain’s death. The story has inspired books, a miniseries, an opera, and most famously the film A Cry in the Dark starring Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain.

1 The Kim Family

Tech editor James Kim, his wife Kati, and their two young daughters set off from Portland, Oregon the day after Thanksgiving 2006, heading for the southern coast. After missing a turnoff, the Kims followed what looked like a shortcut on their map, but was in fact a treacherous road over the mountains. After realizing the route was impassable, the Kims attempted to back their car out, but were unable to do so. They spent the night in the car, only to wake up surrounded by deep snow: They were stranded. The Kims ran the car engine to stay warm and burned tires after the gas ran out. Katie Kim breastfed Penelope, four years old, and Sabine, seven months. After several days, James Kim decided he had to go for help. He set off, saying he would return shortly if he couldn’t find a way out. He never made it back to the car. After nine days, helicopters hired by James Kim’s parents discovered and rescued Kati Kim and her girls.

The body of James Kim was discovered in a creek two days later—he had walked several miles through a steep canyon, but sadly ended up only one mile (as the crow flies) from his family’s car. Tragically, if he’d walked a mile in the other direction, he would have found an empty lodge packed full of food and supplies.

Caroline Coupe is a passionate world traveler who thankfully has no travel horror stories of her own. An avid photographer and aspiring writer, Caroline recently launched her travel blog, LoveLiveTravel and can be found on Twitter at @lovelivetravel.