When you think of dangerous events, you imagine injury, loss, or even death. Yet, among the most perilous incidents there lies a strange silver lining: 10 potentially deadly accidents have astonishingly acted as catalysts for curing serious medical ailments. Below we explore each extraordinary case, from lightning bolts to earthquakes, that turned catastrophe into recovery.

Why These 10 Potentially Deadly Accidents Matter

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

In 1971 Edwin Robinson endured a horrific truck crash that robbed him of sight and left him partially deaf. Nearly a decade later, on June 9, 1980, while attempting to rescue his pet chicken from a downpour outside his Falmouth, Maine home, a bolt of lightning struck him, sending him crashing to the ground and leaving him momentarily stunned.

That very night, both his vision and hearing returned as if by magic. The story quickly captured media attention; Robinson and his wife Doris fielded an avalanche of phone calls, to the point where they had to detach the handset from the landline just to catch a few winks. Television producers also knocked on their door, eager to feature the miracle.

Despite the whirlwind of publicity, the Robinsons walked away with only a modest hundred‑dollar check and reimbursement for travel to various studios. They consciously declined a lucrative television deal that would have granted the network full rights to their tale.

Their refusal stemmed from a belief that the station would sensationalize the event rather than spotlight the couple’s life after the restoration. Doris added that she would have preferred a film focusing on their post‑accident journey, not merely the lightning strike itself.

9 Man Gets Sight Restored After He Is Headbutted By Horse

Don Karkos answered the call to arms after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, joining the U.S. Navy and later serving aboard the tanker USS Rapaden.

The vessel’s mission was to refuel Allied ships across the North Atlantic, a sea teeming with German U‑boats. In 1942, an explosion aboard the Rapaden propelled a metal fragment into Karkos’s forehead, striking just above his right eye.

He lost consciousness, awoke in an Icelandic hospital, and was told he had gone blind in his right eye. Doctors even suggested removal, but he refused. After returning stateside, he worked in a mill and eventually opened a horse farm in 1978, though the loss of his eye made everyday navigation a challenge, especially as cataracts began clouding his left eye.

Six‑four years later, while prepping his horse My Buddy Chimo for a race, the animal slammed its head into his already blinded right eye, knocking him against a wall. That night he felt ill, yet by morning discovered he could see again with that very eye—the same one the horse had struck.

8 Woman Cured Of Multiple Sclerosis After Lightning Strike

On August 17, 1994, Mary Clamser, a longtime multiple‑sclerosis sufferer, experienced a life‑changing event when a bolt of lightning struck her Oklahoma home while she was taking a shower.

MS had gradually robbed her of leg control over 22 years, eventually confining her to a wheelchair. During the shower, one hand gripped the metal shower bar while the other clutched the toilet flush handle, and metal braces on her legs completed an electrical pathway.

The lightning surged through the household wiring, coursing through her body and rendering her unconscious. When she awoke in hospital, a physician was still checking for fractures, yet she could feel the doctor’s hands on her previously paralyzed limbs.

Within three weeks she was walking unaided, shedding her braces, and two months later she confidently slipped into high heels—proof that the strike had undone the MS damage.

7 Man Regains Hearing After Earthquake

On August 23, 2011, a 5.8‑magnitude quake rattled Louisa County, Virginia, sending tremors across the East Coast and prompting evacuations of the Pentagon, Capitol and several hospitals.

For Robert Valderzak, a Washington, D.C. veteran who had gone deaf after a severe fall in June that fractured his skull, the shaking proved fortuitous. He had been living with conductive hearing loss, relying on lip‑reading and a special microphone.

While a patient at the Veterans Affairs Hospital, Valderzak’s three sons and daughter were visiting. When the quake subsided, he realized he could hear his son’s voice clearly for the first time since the injury.

Doctors theorized that the seismic vibrations, coupled with medication, helped drain fluid trapped in his middle ear—a common cause of conductive loss—allowing his hearing to return. Valderzak describes the event as nothing short of a miracle.

6 Lightning Cured A Man’s Cancer

In 1855, English farmer Reuben Stephenson was tilling a field near Langtoft when a bolt of lightning struck his plow, killing the two draft horses attached to it and leaving Stephenson gravely wounded.

Dr. Allison tended to Stephenson’s injuries and, during treatment, noticed a malignant tumor on the farmer’s lip. Planning an operation, he was stunned to discover the tumor had vanished by the time Stephenson recovered enough for surgery.

Allison concluded that the lightning strike had somehow eradicated the cancer, attributing Stephenson’s cure to the extraordinary electrical discharge.

5 Teenager Stops Using Prescription Glasses After Getting Struck By Lightning

In July 2017, sixteen‑year‑old Faith Mobley was washing dishes at a McDonald’s drive‑through in Haleyville, Alabama, when a lightning bolt struck the restaurant, traveling through the pipe system to where she stood.

The current coursed through her headset and exited through her left foot, leaving a sizable hole in her shoe and a burn on her foot. She lost consciousness but was revived by a coworker who called emergency services.

After regaining consciousness, Mobley discovered her eyesight had dramatically improved; the glasses she’d worn for years were no longer necessary, and even the color of her irises had shifted.

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

In February 1988, the Associated Press reported a harrowing yet astonishing story of a man known only as George, who unintentionally cured his obsessive‑compulsive disorder during a failed suicide attempt five years earlier.

George’s OCD manifested as relentless hand‑washing and showering rituals driven by an overwhelming fear of germs, eventually costing him his job and education and plunging him into deep depression.

Armed with a .22‑caliber rifle, he aimed at his brain through his mouth, pulling the trigger. The bullet pierced his skull, lodging in the left frontal lobe, but did not kill him. Surgeons later extracted the projectile, which had damaged the brain region responsible for his compulsions.

Post‑operation, George’s IQ rebounded to its pre‑OCD level, he secured employment, returned to school, and achieved top grades. Physician’s Weekly labeled the episode a ‘successful radical surgery.’

3 Woman Recovers Sight After Falling And Hitting Her Head

In 1993, Mary Ann Franco survived a severe automobile crash that left her with spinal injuries and induced blindness.

On August 2015, while walking across her Florida living room, she tripped, striking her head on what she thought was a fireplace and fracturing her neck in the process.

Following neck surgery, she awoke from anesthesia to find her sight fully restored, marking a dramatic reversal of her previous blindness.

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

In January 2017, researchers at Trinity College Dublin published a case study describing a woman, identified only as AB, whose synesthesia—a condition causing cross‑sensory perceptions—was temporarily eliminated after a lightning strike.

Synesthesia can make individuals taste words, hear colors, or feel ambient emotions, often leading to distress and medication use. AB experienced these mixed senses before the incident.

The electrical discharge appeared to erase the condition, though it later resurfaced, indicating a fleeting cure.

1 Blind Man Cured After Falling Down Stairs

In 2013, sixty‑eight‑year‑old Pierre‑Paul Thomas, born with congenital nystagmus that rendered him functionally blind, suffered a fall down the stairs in his Montreal home.

The tumble shattered several facial bones, including those surrounding his eyes, prompting immediate surgical repair.

During the operation, a plastic surgeon suggested correcting his eyes as part of the procedure, and Thomas consented.

Surgeons removed the cataract that had been responsible for his blindness, effectively restoring his vision, although his underlying nystagmus remained untreatable.

Doctors hypothesize that Thomas’s sight was present but obscured by the cataract; the accident merely led to the surgery that uncovered it.

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.”