Two things are often very true of the modern world. No one wants to get sick, and no one wants to see the doctor. Getting sick makes you feel bad, so that’s a given. But there is ample evidence that people in need of doctors avoid care for a variety of reasons ranging from nervousness to lack of access or lack of insurance and so on. And there’s also a certain percentage of people who think they can save time and frustration by managing their healthcare at home with some DIY methods. It just doesn’t always work out.

10. Using a Plunger for Constipation 

Constipation is a symptom of numerous conditions. But regardless of the underlying cause it’s characterized by an inability to maintain proper bowel function such that going to the washroom is difficult or even impossible, sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. It can get very serious if untreated for a long enough period.

In 2019, doctors wrote about a man who had been constipated for four days and sought to fix the problem on his own. Yes, there are plenty of at-home remedies for this condition but rather than use any of those, the 56-year-old chose to use the one tool we all associate with making stuck poop get unstuck: the plunger.

The patient had a history of both alcoholism and mental illness which might explain his dangerous choice. According to the paper it was the first time such an injury had ever been recorded. The man did not use the handle as you might think but rather he used the plunger as intended, sealing it and using forced air in an attempt to force out the blockage resulting in a serious perforation to the colon.

9. Self Infecting with Hookworms for Allergy Control

For some people, allergies can be brutal. Most people manage their seasonal allergies with medications that can last for a day or two at a time. You can also get shots from a doctor to help deal with symptoms. But what if you learned of another more permanent way to make symptoms go away? How extreme an allergy cure would you be willing to try?

People who suffer from parasitic infections often don’t demonstrate any allergy symptoms. This is because parasites, like tapeworms or hookworms, have an immunosuppressant effect on their hosts. The parasites don’t want to be fighting off your immune system, so they dial it back. That, in turn, prevents your body from overreacting to allergens which is what causes those annoying allergic reactions in the first place.

One researcher who noticed this, and had serious allergies, made himself the guinea pig in his own experiment. He infected himself with hookworms to see what would happen. For two years, with a hookworm happily living in his guts, he lived allergy-free. 

It’s not a medically accepted treatment by any means and comes with many dangers, but researchers are hoping they can determine how parasites cause this reaction and duplicate it, minus the worms.

8. George Boole’s Wife Treated His Illness with Buckets of Water

George Boole was one of the most important mathematicians and logicians in history. Boolean algebra got its name from him. He taught himself Greek, German and French while he was still in his teens, so it’s safe to say his genius was diverse and impressive.  However, neither he nor his wife was well-versed in medicine.

When Boole was 49 he was walking to work as a college professor and, for two miles, he walked in a cold rain. Then he lectured in his wet clothes. Shortly thereafter he came down with a bad cold and a fever. 

In an effort to make him better, Boole’s wife believed the treatment needed to mimic the cause. So, while George was sick and bedridden, she continually tossed buckets of water on him. Needless to say, the cure failed and Boole died a short time later.

7. Bleach Enemas for Autism

If you haven’t had a daily dose of outrage today, this one ought to do it for you. In 2019, it was revealed that a small group of parents with autistic children were discussing ways to “treat” their children in private Facebook groups. One of these treatments, an alleged cure for autism, involved dosing the kids with bleach. 

Autism is not an infection or virus that has a known cause or cure in the sense that something like food poisoning or a headache might. And, even if it did, bleach is toxic and not a cure for anything. That said, many of the parents in these groups still believed their children had infections, or viruses, or allergies, or were poisoned by something else. Most of us have heard the various conspiracies around autism over the years to get some idea of what might have been going on.

The “treatments” shared by parents ranged from dosing the kids with their own urine to turpentine to the very popular chlorine dioxide, or bleach, which could be administered as an enema, orally or in baths. That’s effectively a chemical torture. 

One product being sold was called Miracle Mineral Solution, a strong sodium chlorite mix that needed to be mixed with citric acid to form industrial strength bleach. The FDA issued a warning about it back in 2010. Warnings were still being issued in 2019. 

During the pandemic it was marketed as a cure for Covid. Colombian officials at that time linked it to seven deaths in America. 

6. The Carolina Reaper Was an Attempt to Cure Cancer

Aside from cats and memes and a half dozen other choice items, if there’s one thing the internet loves it’s hot stuff. Just look at Hot Ones! Spicy is always popular. And while pepper farmers are always creating new and face-melting hybrids to destroy the human palate, the reason behind some of these peppers may not be what you think. In specific, the Carolina Reaper pepper wasn’t invented just to make you feel like your tongue was on fire. 

Guinness certified the Carolina Reaper as the hottest pepper in the world in 2017 with an average Scoville rating of over 1.5 million. For some perspective, sriracha hot sauce is usually 1,000 to 2,500 at most. But Ed Currie, the man behind the Reaper, had another goal in mind for his pepper.

Currie comes from a family where cancer is common. His original goal for the Reaper was cancer treatment. Currie thinks capsaicinoids, the compounds that give peppers heat, can help cure the disease so he was developing new ones. Currie had been diagnosed with cancer in the past and has overcome thyroid and skin cancer. Since taking up eating hot peppers he’s had nothing come back, which fuels his belief he’s onto something. 

5. Goat Wet Nurses Helped Stop the Spread of Syphilis

Once upon a time, goats were far more involved in child rearing than they are today. To be specific, they were sometimes used as wet nurses. Back in the times before bottles and formula, feeding a child was sometimes much harder than modern people think. If the mother was unable to breastfeed, options were very limited. Wet nurses were employed in many places but they weren’t always available or affordable either. And, on top of that, there was a complication when it came to something like syphilis.

If either a baby or a wet nurse had syphilis, they were a danger to the other. So goats were sometimes used to help stop the spread of the disease. A goat could be used as a wet nurse without fear of disease spread. This could limit the spread of the disease and also ensure babies got fed, which was basically a win-win. 

4. A Teenager Cut Off His Own Hand To Treat His Internet Addiction

Internet addiction is a modern phenomenon and, according to one study, it’s huge. As many as 6% of the world’s population has an internet addiction. That’s about 468 million people. That’s more than the population of South America. 

One teen in China took his internet addiction problem to extremes by trying to solve it in the worst way. He cut his own hand off.

Reports say the 19-year-old chose to do it right out of the blue after leaving a note for his mom that he’d be back soon. He lopped the appendage off, called a cab, and went to the hospital. Surgeons were actually able to reattach it but weren’t convinced he’d have full use of it again. 

3. A Woman Tried to Treat Her Athlete’s Foot with Garlic

If you Google home or herbal remedies for any number of conditions, you’ll find garlic pop up frequently. It’s allegedly good for blood pressure, has antiseptic or antibiotic properties, and a lot more. But that doesn’t mean you can use it for anything, especially without insight into how or why it’s supposed to work. One thing you never want to try is to treat athlete’s foot with garlic. 

A woman in England had been applying raw garlic slices to her infected toe for four weeks. Instead of killing the fungal infection, the raw garlic managed to burn the flesh across her toe in a way that’s absolutely terrifying if you see the photos. 

Garlic contains diallyl disulfide. The compound caused the severe chemical burn, leading to red, blistered, and peeling skin across her entire toe. It can even happen to cooks who handle too much garlic at work. 

2. A Man Tried to Cure His Back Pain with Semen Injections

There is a belief among a small number of people that our own bodies somehow produce medicine. Urine therapy has been practiced in many cultures for centuries but it’s also based on nothing scientific and has not been shown to have beneficial effects. In fact, quite the opposite, it can be dangerous. But if that’s a belief people hold, maybe it’s no surprise that there are some who might seek the benefits of other fluids.

In 2019, a man in Ireland ended up in the hospital after trying to cure his back pain with injections of his own semen. He’d been giving injections in his arm and developed cellulitis as a result. During their research, doctors determined the man apparently came up with the cure all on his own as there was no evidence of anyone else having tried it online.

1. People Consumed Their Own Relatives to Fight Tuberculosis

You’ll be hard pressed to find a more medically questionable story than this one from the last two centuries or so. This is how tuberculosis was dealt with in New England, at least for a short time, in the late 1800s. It involved vampires.

So TB is spreading in a small town at a time when people didn’t understand how diseases spread. If multiple members of a family fell ill, others suspected something else was linking them. In this case, a fully undead ghoul. In one case, a mother and eldest daughter fell ill and died. Then the next daughter passed. And then the son got sick. That’s four in one house, and that raised suspicions.

Believing the family cursed, the father agreed to let people exhume the corpses of his wife and daughters. The eldest daughter and wife had decayed as expected, but the other daughter had barely decomposed and still had blood in her heart. This was likely due to the fact it was winter when she died as the ground was too cold to bury her, so she was preserved. The town disagreed. 

The girl was labeled a vampire. Her head was removed and her internal organs were burned. The ashes were fed to the son, believing it would lift the curse and fix the illness. So he consumed the burned remains of his own sister. He also died a short time later.

With money tight all around, more people are *trying* to save by DIY’ing—doing it yourself. From construction to renovation to crafting to even piercings, people are trying everything themselves. But for every dollar it saves, it’s that much more likely to result in total calamity. From collapsed walls to scarred faces to exploded toilets, there is an infinite number of ways in which you can totally screw the pooch when doing it yourself. 

On a whole host of websites, users have taken to sharing their at-home horrors with the world, baring their failures so that we all might laugh and hopefully not repeat the mistake. 

With both those goals in mind, here are ten of the best—meaning worst— do-it-yourself projects gone horribly wrong.

10 Tiktok-Inspired Freckles 

We all know the type of person who would do anything to get famous. What if you were already scheduled to be on reality TV but still felt the urge to change up your look? Meet Australia’s “Big Brother” contestant Tilly Whitfield. A gorgeous gal for sure, who was inspired by a TikTok trend to give herself fake freckles. According to her Instagram post, she “…literally shoved needles deep into [her] skin… lol.” 

The pictures she shared are horrendous, but the description of her initial reaction is even worse: “I ended up in hospital with temporary loss of vision in my eye due to swelling and was very sick from the infection, not to mention my face was somewhat unrecognizable.” This is all after claiming at first: “It didn’t hurt at all, so I didn’t think I should stop.” During her time on the show, she swapped between wearing a face mask or makeup at all times to cover it up. Thankfully she learned her lesson with a reminder to always leave the needles-in-your-face kind of procedures up to your doctor.

9 Curtains Fail

If you don’t believe in such a thing as DIY karma, then this next story will convince you. Fully equipped with multiple DIY tutorials, Latasha James thought she might save herself a buck or two and set up some stylish curtains herself to match the rest of her apartment. She put them together and connected them to her concrete ceiling with some store-bought brackets, tape, and a curtain rod. She was so sure of her success she even documented it on her YouTube channel. We’re already cringing at the thought of her using tape above any other kind of permanent attachment. And sure enough, her experiment was a costly mistake.

Days passed, and she reveled in her success until things came crashing down. Literally. The entire setup fell, and the casualty was the bar cart beneath. She came home that day to her partner running wildly with paper towels in hand as red wine spilled absolutely everywhere. Hopefully, at least one of the bottles survived—they’ll definitely need that after the clean up.

8 100-Parter Bathroom Fail

Bad decisions tend to snowball. Say you nosh on a doughnut and coffee for breakfast—you’re more likely to grab something else fatty or sugary for lunch or, say, overeat at dinner. Grace O’Heeran, a 23-year-old Texan university graduate, went viral on TikTok for said snowball effect while renovating the bathroom in her new house.

Grace, in her DIY shame-fame, explained that a car crash and resultant brain injury “has a lot to do with [her] decision making and impulsiveness… I impulsively painted my bathroom floor black and knew it was game over from there and no turning back.” 

Said decisions included a hand-stenciled tile floor and green, sparkled, insect-infected-looking countertops. Commenters on her videos begged and pleaded with her at almost every step to stop and hire a professional. But after weeks of scrapped work and a total of $1,000 spent ($700 higher than her initial budget), she somehow ended up happy with the result—as ghastly as it is.

7 Good Deed Gone Wrong

The winter season is best for spreading some neighborly joy. But this submission from a user at familyhandyman.com shows that some good deeds are actually punishments in disguise. Equipped with a fancy new snowblower that cleaned off their driveway and walkway in no time, they thought to extend the same courtesy to their elderly neighbor. Well, things went fine until they accidentally ran over the garden hose, getting it “royally tangled.”

They then spent a frustrating hour removing bits and pieces of plastic hose from the snowblower, and after that, called it quits and returned home. Later that evening, the neighbor called, crying over a soaked basement. It turns out that running over the hose caused a leak inside the house behind the house bib—the perfect recipe for disaster in the middle of winter.

6 Shred-splosion

One user at Australia’s handyman.net writes about what should have been the simplest thing: spraying a bit of lubricant on his shredder. Nothing is as satisfying as a nice shred, and when your shredder is aging or clogged, a little lubricant in the gears will get it right back to satisfaction mode—in theory.

The user writes that they “sprayed the shredding mechanism liberally.” Liberally might be the most important word there as then the shredder, well, it exploded. Their hypothesis: “A spark had ignited the accumulated vapors in the enclosed area of the shredder.” Luckily they were unhurt aside from some visible souvenirs. “…a quick check in the mirror revealed my singed eyebrows and hair.”

5 Exploding Toilet

One “Reader’s Digest” reader sent in their story about their creative solution for fixing an especially clogged toilet. Their son’s plastic potty training attachment had fallen into the toilet and became irreversibly stuck. To their credit, the reader had a creative solution. They write, “I had a brilliant idea: I’d burn it out!”

They removed the toilet, brought it outside, and set it ablaze, feeling triumphant. “I poured charcoal lighter fluid down the trap and lit it up. Standing back, I basked in the glory of the geyser flames and my phenomenal ingenuity.” That is, until it exploded. Yup, another explosion. A toilet explosion. Their story ends with a simple, “I bought a new toilet.”

4 Sump Dump

A user at familyhandyman.com writes about their husband’s well-intentioned but shoddy attempt to prepare for 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. She and her husband were installing a backup system for their sump pump in case they lost power. The husband cut into a piece of PVC pipe the user was holding, and she was immediately blasted in the face with “nasty brown water.”

Like the good assistant she is, she held on to the pipe and didn’t say a word as the rancid spray kept coming out. Luckily, he eventually noticed. “It took him a few seconds to realize what was happening. He had forgotten to unplug the pump. After pulling the plug, he looked at me with a worried expression, but I began laughing hysterically.” It turns out the pump worked just fine, but I hope for her sake that the brown water really was just water.

3 Trapped in the Closet

Another “Reader’s Digest” reader was an experienced handyman, so he DIY’ed his entire house, building it almost entirely himself. A truly impressive feat, though not one that went perfectly. When it came time to install his closet door, one that swung outward, he managed to bungle the job enough to nail himself inside the room with no exit.

As he writes: “To keep the door frame square, I nailed blocks at a 45-degree angle to the outside of the jambs. (I then) started shooting nails into the jambs. When I finished, I tried to open the door. The blocks were nailed across the jambs on the other side.” He had nailed the door shut securely and “didn’t have a hammer or a pry bar.” Luckily, he had hope. He had his phone. His brother eventually freed him and though the brother hasn’t given him a hard time yet, “I know he’s just waiting for the right moment.”

2 Sun Dumb

Another entry at Family Handyman is a story best summarized as “think about Wile E. Coyote sitting on a limb of a tree and sawing it off!” The user is a construction worker who was foolish enough to be working alone in 100-degree weather, which caused him to make an almost deadly mistake.

He had to cut off “a 3-ft. piece of a rim joist.” He also, however, “stood on the rim joist without realizing I was standing on the very piece of wood I intended to cut off.” It is indeed a very Wile E. Coyote moment. Cutting through the very beam he was standing on, the user fell. Luckily, the saw he was using didn’t land on—or in—him, and he missed all other dangerous tools and wood pieces. He was hospitalized, though, for being dehydrated and experiencing sunstroke.

1 Gorilla Glue Girl

In January 2021, Jessica Brown became a viral sensation for a DIY trick of hers that went about as poorly as humanly possible. Brown liked to keep her long, braided ponytail in place with Got2b Glued Blasting Freeze spray but found herself unexpectedly out of the spray. She thought up an at-home hack and sprayed her hair—every inch of it—with Gorilla Glue. It did not go well.

Brown’s ponytail was stuck in the same position, unmovable (let alone unbridgeable or washable), for a month. On TikTok, she shared her story, tapping her hair as proof. It made a sound like plastic on a marble counter. Brown even visited the emergency room for help, but they could not dissolve the glue. It wasn’t until a plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael Obeng donated his time to her, giving her an experimental surgery of his own design to free her scalp from the polyurethane-based glue.