Potentially deadly incidents and accidents like earthquakes, lightning strikes, and hard falls are not always bad—at least to people who have benefited from them. Over the centuries, people have been cured of illnesses and other medical conditions after experiencing some of the aforementioned incidents and accidents.

Their medical conditions ranged from blindness and deafness to mental illnesses and even cancer. Yes! People have been cured of cancer after they were struck by lightning, Others miraculously regained their sight after they were headbutted by animals. One man was even cured of deafness after an earthquake.

10 Blind Man Gets Sight Restored After He Is Struck By Lightning

In 1971, Edwin Robinson was in a terrible truck accident that left him blind and partly deaf. That changed on June 9, 1980, when he was hit by a bolt of lightning outside his home in Falmouth, Maine, while trying to get his pet chicken out of the rain. The lightning blasted him to the ground and left him stunned.

That night, Robinson’s sight and hearing were miraculously restored. The incident was widely reported at the time. Robinson and his wife, Doris, received so many calls that they had to unhook their landline telephone—that is, separate the headset from the phone body—to get some sleep. They also received requests to be guests on several television shows.

The couple never made money from the extensive media coverage. All they earned was a hundred bucks and some money to cover travel expenses to television stations. They scuttled an opportunity to make money from the incident when they turned down a television station that approached them to do a show.

The Robinsons rejected the offer because the station wanted full rights to the production. Robinson said the television station would have exaggerated the incident instead of focusing on his miraculous recovery. Doris also mentioned that she preferred a movie focusing on their lives after Robinson went blind and deaf and not just on the lightning accident.^[1]

9 Man Gets Sight Restored After He Is Headbutted By Horse

Don Karkos was one of the many Americans who enlisted in the US military after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Karkos joined the US Navy and was posted to the tanker ship USS Rapaden.

The vessel was tasked with refueling Allied ships in the North Atlantic, which was filled with German U-boats. USS Rapaden was on one of its many runs to the North Atlantic when an explosion occurred in 1942. A metal fragment dispersed by the blast hit Karkos above the right eye and injured his forehead.

Karkos lost consciousness after the accident and awakened in an Icelandic hospital. There, doctors informed him that he was blind in his right eye. Doctors even offered to remove the eye, but Karkos refused. He returned to the US where he worked in a mill before setting up a horse farm in 1978.

The loss of the eye was troublesome for Karkos. He had problems seeing the walls right in front of him and often ran into them headfirst. It got worse when he slowly started losing the vision in his left eye to cataracts. Fortunately, he recovered the sight in his right eye in an accident 64 years later.

Karkos was preparing a horse called My Buddy Chimo for a race when it headbutted him in the blinded right eye and slammed him against a wall. Karkos returned home that night feeling sick. However, he soon discovered that he could see with the right eye—the same one that the horse had hit.^[2]

8 Woman Cured Of Multiple Sclerosis After Lightning Strike

On August 17, 1994, Mary Clamser was cured of multiple sclerosis after she was struck by lightning right inside her Oklahoma home. Multiple sclerosis is a disease that affects the central nervous system and slowly paralyzes sufferers.

Clamser suffered from the disease for 22 years during which she slowly lost control of her legs and ended up in a wheelchair. Clamser was in the shower when the lightning struck. One of her hands was on the metal bar in the shower while the other was on the handle of the flush toilet. She also had metal braces on her legs.

The lightning struck her home and traveled through the main to hit her in the shower. She lost consciousness and woke up in a hospital. A doctor was checking if her bones had been broken at the time she regained consciousness.

However, she could feel the doctor’s hands on her legs even though paralyzed people cannot feel sensations on the paralyzed body part. She was able to walk without the braces three weeks later and was wearing high heels two months later.^[3]

7 Man Regains Hearing After Earthquake

On August 23, 2011, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake hit Louisa County, Virginia, and was felt along the East Coast and nearby areas. Rail and air traffic were delayed, and two nuclear reactors were shut down. Several buildings—including the Pentagon, Capitol, State Department offices, and several hospitals—were hurriedly evacuated.

While the earthquake scared everyone, it was a blessing for Robert Valderzak of Washington, DC, after it cured him of his deafness. Valderzak had gone deaf after suffering a bad fall on Father’s Day two months earlier in June. He fractured his skull and lost his hearing. He learned lip-reading and required a special microphone when talking.

Valderzak was a patient in the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Washington, DC, when the earthquake struck. His daughter and three sons were visiting him at the time. Valderzak realized that he could hear his son talk after the earthquake was over.

Doctors think Valderzak regained his hearing because he suffered from “conductive hearing loss,” which is caused by fluids getting trapped in the ear. Doctors say the vibrations of the earthquake and the drugs they administered caused the fluid to drain and allowed Valderzak to hear once more. He believes the incident was a miracle.^[4]

6 Lightning Cured A Man’s Cancer

In 1855, Reuben Stephenson was plowing a field in Langtoft, England, when he was struck by lightning, which killed the two horses connected to the plow. Stephenson was so badly injured that people thought he was going to die. However, he survived after one Dr. Allison nursed him back to health.

While administering treatment, the doctor noticed that Stephenson had a cancerous tumor on his lip. Dr. Alison attempted to operate on the tumor after Stephenson recovered only to discover that the tumor had disappeared. Alison believed that Stephenson was cured of the cancer as he recovered from the lightning strike.^[5]

5 Teenager Stops Using Prescription Glasses After Getting Struck By Lightning

In July 2017, 16-year-old Faith Mobley was doing the dishes at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Haleyville, Alabama, when she was struck by lightning. It hit the restaurant and traveled through the pipes to wherever Mobley was doing the dishes.

The lightning went through the drive-thru headset that Mobley was wearing and exited through her left foot, creating a large hole in her shoe. Mobley lost consciousness but was saved by a coworker who called 911. Mobley later said that she felt her body tighten as she was struck, just before she went numb and lost consciousness.^[6]

Her only injury was a burn on her foot where the lightning had left her body. Miraculously, her eyesight seemed to have been restored. She had worn glasses before the incident but did not need them any longer. The color of her eyes also changed.

4 Man Cured Of Mental Illness After Shooting Himself In The Head

In February 1988, the Associated Press reported that a man only identified as “George” unwittingly cured himself of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) during a failed suicide attempt five years earlier. George was 19 years old at the time of the incident.

OCD is a frustrating personality disorder that makes sufferers develop weird perfectionist behaviors. For instance, George showered and washed his hands unusually often because he was afraid of germs. This would later cost him his job and education. He became depressed and decided to commit suicide.

George got a .22-caliber rifle and aimed at his brain through his mouth. He pulled the trigger but did not die. Instead, the bullet went through his skull and stopped in the left front part of his brain. Doctors extracted the bullet, which only damaged the area of the brain causing the OCD.

Afterward, George’s IQ returned to the level it was before the disorder had set in. He recovered, got a job, and went back to school where he became an A student. Physician’s Weekly called the whole incident a “successful radical surgery.”^[7]

3 Woman Recovers Sight After Falling And Hitting Her Head

In 1993, Mary Ann Franco was in an auto accident that left her with serious spinal injuries that caused blindness. However, she regained her sight after another accident in her Florida home in August 2015.

Franco was walking across her living room to the door when she tripped and fell, hitting her head on what she thought was the fireplace. Franco also broke her neck during the accident. She underwent surgery on the neck and recovered from anesthesia to discover that her sight had been restored.^[8]

2 Woman Cured Of Her Super Senses After Getting Struck By Lightning

In January 2017, some researchers at Trinity College Dublin published a research paper about a woman who was cured of synesthesia after getting struck by lightning. The researchers did not reveal the identity of the woman and only called her “AB.”

Synesthesia is a strange condition with many variations, including those in which people taste words, smell sound, hear colors, and feel the atmosphere around other people. However, sufferers sometimes hate the condition because of its undesirable side effects. Some even end up on medications.

AB was temporarily cured of the condition after she was struck by lightning. We say temporarily because the synesthesia later returned.^[9]

1 Blind Man Cured After Falling Down Stairs

In 2013, 68-year-old Pierre-Paul Thomas was partly cured of blindness that he had from birth. Thomas was not actually cured by the accident. It just happened to be the major reason that he underwent the surgery that led to his cure.

Since birth, Thomas had suffered from congenital nystagmus, a medical condition caused when the eyes are not properly fitted in the sockets. Sufferers are unable to control their eyes, which wander about the sockets, leading to blindness.

Thomas was cured after a fall in his home in Montreal. He broke several facial bones, including some bones in his eyes. He underwent surgery to fix the bones. After the surgery, a plastic surgeon asked if he wanted his eyes fixed. Thomas agreed.

The surgeons operated on Thomas’s eyes and removed the cataract that caused the blindness. Doctors suspect that Thomas still had his sight despite the congenital nystagmus but lost it after damage by the cataract. However, Thomas’s sight was not perfect as congenital nystagmus is incurable.^[10]

Medicine is better than ever, thank goodness. And those of us lucky to be alive (and in the right countries and societies) have access to the best medical science and technology in history. But curing diseases is not all lab-coated researchers moving colored liquid from one test tube to another, as every science scene in movie history would have you believe. 

It can get weird. 

In the battle against the diseases that trouble us the most, whether because they’re so common, so deadly, or both, scientists will try almost anything. Potential cures come from everywhere. And sometimes the human body does the same, miraculously curing itself due to some obscure reason or another. No matter how it happens, a disease cured is a disease cured, and someone lives to tell their strange tale. Here are ten of those tales, some of the most surprising ways in which a disease has been cured.

10 Allergies—Parasitic Worms

Since the 70s, scientists and doctors have noted connections between people infected with parasitic worms and lack of allergies. The most common connection is between hookworm infection and lack of hay fever, even if it had been present before the worms. For some people, this is true. A hookworm infection cures allergies.

I stress some people because there have been many, including those in several large-scale trials, for whom worm infection did not relieve any allergy symptoms. And yet there have undoubtedly been many for whom it has worked. Back in 1976, British scientist Jonathan Turton, who had suffered from hay fever previously, swallowed a hookworm and was quickly and thoroughly cured for the two years the worms stayed in. Since then, dozens of scientists have done the same to themselves and found similar results.

9 Blindness—Reengineered Viruses

Several teams of researchers across the world have used one virus or another to cure congenital forms of blindness. One example is the team at the University of California Berkeley, which was able to almost completely cure test subjects (in this case monkeys) of two congenital diseases which cause blindness: X-linked retinoschisis and Leber’s congenital amaurosis.

Those inflicted with the disease essentially just have a non-working version of a normal gene needed for eyesight. The UCB team inserted normal, functioning copies of the gene into viruses and injected them near the retina. The viruses then did what viruses do and injected their own genetic material into the retinal cells, including the functioning human eye gene, causing the retinal cells to gain the functioning gene. In the test monkeys, eyesight returned almost completely to normal.

8 Mental Illness—A Laser Lobotomy

You might have thought lobotomies were outlawed or otherwise forcibly stopped a long time ago, probably around the deinstitutionalization of insane asylums in the 60s. You’d be mostly right, as by the 70s virtually all traditional lobotomies had ceased. But in the last decade, with an exponential rise in cutting-edge technology, as well as in knowledge of brain structure, psychosurgeries have become popular again.

Though the surgeries are still controversial—they do, after all, remind people of some of the most barbaric medicine in history—they now have a solid track record of working. Many of them use fine lasers to precisely target small areas of the brain and remove, or ablate, tissue known to cause undesirable behavior, most commonly OCD. The surgeries are always used as a last resort and only in extreme cases, but they truly do work. Over half of all patients recover to completely normal brain function.

7 Bacterial Infection—A Poop Transplant

C. diff., short for Clostridium difficile colitis, is a potentially serious condition where your gut bacteria are out of whack. Usually due to antibiotic use, the ‘good’ bacteria in the gut die off and one bad bacteria, C. diff., takes over. In some cases, more antibiotics can actually help by killing the C. diff., but most require further action. In this case, a poop transplant.

During an otherwise normal colonoscopy, doctors will insert fecal matter from healthy donors, full of the ‘good’ gut bacteria, up into the colon. This resets the gut microbiome and helps it reestablish in healthy proportions. As weird as it sounds, fecal transplants are very effective treatments for C. diff.

6 Cardiac Arrest—Intentional Hypothermia

Cardiac arrest is an extremely dangerous condition in which the heart’s electrical system malfunctions, stopping its beating, followed quickly by a loss of breathing and consciousness. It results in death roughly 88% of the time. Even in cases where medical personnel are able to restart the heart, patients often die from prolonged lack of oxygen to the brain.

To counter this, doctors began inducing hypothermia in patients. If the heart is able to be restarted but the patient is still unconscious, they can be placed into hypothermia, their body lowered to between 89 and 93 degrees, for about a day. This prevents much of the damage to the brain and greatly increases the chance they’ll wake up at all.

5 Necrosis & Gangrene—Maggots

Like the lobotomy, the use of maggots to consume dead tissue is considered an obsolete, barbaric form of medicine. But also like the lobotomy, maggots have found a recent resurgence in popularity within mainstream medicine and have shown solid results.

Maggots originally fell out of favor due to 1. being gross, and 2. being supplanted by antibiotics. Ironically, it is antibiotic resistance that allowed maggots to make their comeback. Doctors now use maggots as a treatment for necrosis in some cases where antibiotics are ineffective; the maggots’ efficient removal of the necrotic tissue can prevent it from spreading and therefore even prevent amputation.

4 Skin Cancer—Herpes

Melanoma is a dangerous, fast-spreading form of skin cancer. It begins by infecting the pigment-producing cells in your skin, which is why you might hear people worrying over raised or oddly colored moles. But trials have shown an unusual medication to be an effective treatment. That medication is herpes.

Researchers at UCLA conducted a two-year study in which they used a modified version of the herpes virus to treat advanced melanoma. The virus was modified to target the cancer cells and 1. attract the body’s immune cells to the cancer cells, and 2. kill the cancer cells directly. A full two-thirds of patients receiving the modified herpes alongside cancer meds fared better than those using cancer meds alone.

3 Leukemia—A Pneumonia Appetizer

Leukemias are types of cancer that infect the blood and can be extremely debilitating. Though modern science and technology have dramatically increased their survivability, it is still around the 50% mark, meaning the best care in the world can get you up to the odds of a coin toss. And though extremely rare, spontaneous remissions do occur. It turns out a lot of these remissions might be due to pneumonia.

A 2014 study from Washington University compiled every instance of spontaneous remission for an aggressive type of leukemia called acute myeloid leukemia, a total of 46 cases. They found that in an impressive 90% of cases, the patients had recovered from an infection, most commonly pneumonia, shortly before the cancer diagnosis. It’s thought that, at least for AML, a recent immune response makes battling the tumors a heck of a lot easier.

2 SARS—It Was Just Too Good

From 2002-2004, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), wreaked havoc worldwide, but mainly affected China and other southeast Asian countries. A few concerning cases were reported in Canada and the US and 27 other countries.

SARS caused a great deal of international concern due to its novel nature (it was the first of the SARS family, hence its type-name) and high case fatality rate of 11%. But for the same reason it frightened scientists, SARS disappeared quickly and relatively easily; it was just too deadly.

SARS, when compared to related viruses like COVID (itself a SARS variant), was much more severe. Those who contracted it showed symptoms much more quickly and much more severely, and so it made them easy to identify and quarantine. That and, although it is grim to say, the higher proportion of casualties meant fewer vectors for the disease to move through the world and also less chance for the virus to adapt in partially-cured hosts.

1 Brain-eating Amoeba—Unknown

12-year-old Kali Hardig is a medical anomaly. She survived parasitic meningitis caused by a contraction of brain-eating amoebas, which has a survival rate of less than 1%. At that point, only two out of 128 infected patients had ever survived. Kali became number three, and no one really knows how.

The amoeba in question is Naegleria fowleri, which is believed to be found in warm freshwater, and it is thought that Kali contracted it while at Willow Springs Water Park in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her symptoms sprung up within a day and quickly became critical. Certainly, her doctors deserve all the credit in the world for their unceasing, comprehensive care, but there was no standardized treatment plan for this extremely rare condition. In the end, as Kali’s mother put it, “it’s just a miracle.”