Swallow. Do you feel a slight tickle at the back of your throat, a barely perceptible ache in your neck? Is your forehead just a little warmer than usual? Sure? Check again. Now take a deep breath, and try not to think about the weird pressure you’ve been feeling around your eyes for the past three hours. You’re probably just tired. Outbreaks caused by foodborne illnesses happen all the time—because only two people need to get sick for the CDC to consider it an official outbreak. That’s hardly cause for alarm.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Poisonous Foods You Love To Eat

So should you be concerned about parasites and pathogenic bacteria festering in your happy meal? Probably not. But then again . . . maybe you should.

10 Amoebiasis Dissolves Your Organ Tissues

If you’ve ever traveled to a different country and come back with a bad case of diarrhea, you probably picked up what the medical world calls “traveler’s diarrhea,” a relatively minor affliction caused by food that’s carrying bacteria from fecal matter.

Amoebiasis is similar, but much, much worse. Like traveler’s diarrhea, you get it by eating or drinking something with tiny quantities of fecal matter in it. Unlike bacterial traveler’s diarrhea, it’s caused by an amoeba called E. Histolytica. The amoeba enters your body through the digestive tract as a cyst, sort of like an egg. Once inside your warm, incubating stomach, the cyst hatches into a hungry amoeba. At this point, it attacks the layer of mucus lining your intestines.

The mucus lining is intended specifically to block parasites like E. Histolytica from getting through, and it usually works. But sometimes, the amoeba is able to dig all the way through to the soft tissue of your intestinal wall, where it begins secreting enzymes that break down the tissue’s proteins.

Once the intestinal wall is sufficiently dissolved, the amoeba slurps up the resulting goo and begins reproducing. Some newborn cysts are swept away in the bowel stream to continue the cycle elsewhere, while others hatch and grow in the same intestines, spreading, eating, and digging. It’s incredibly painful.

9 Ciguatoxins Reverse How You Feel Hot And Cold

Every time you eat fish, there’s a chance that you’ll die a horrible death. And while there are many ways for that to happen, one of the worst is via ciguatoxin. Ciguatoxins bioaccumulate, which means they build up as they move up the food chain. They’re produced by a type of plankton called a dinoflagellate, and by the time the toxin makes it through the gauntlet of coral, then herbivorous fish, then increasingly larger carnivores, and finally onto your dinner plate, the toxin has accumulated to biblical proportions. And that’s when things get messy.

You start to feel the toxin about two hours after eating a tainted fish—indigestion, nausea, and cramps are usually the first signs. If you’re lucky, it stops there (and it often does). But if you’re particularly susceptible to ciguatoxins, they go to work on your nervous system. You might get lightheaded, tingly, or short of breath. Your heart will be racing a mile a minute and your lips will go numb.

Finally, your neurological processes will start to misfire. One of the strangest examples of this is a reversal of your perception of hot and cold. Ice will feel like it’s burning while a lit stove will feel like, well, ice. It would almost make an interesting superpower if it didn’t signal complete neurological degeneration.

8 Cryptosporidium Corrodes Your Intestines

We’ve talked about cryptosporidium in the past. It’s usually found in contaminated drinking water, though it can also be transmitted through unwashed food. But we haven’t till now covered what happens after the bug gets inside you.

Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite that needs a living host to reproduce. It enters your body as microscopic oocysts, which hatch in your belly and travel through the digestive system into your intestines. There, they make a new home among your villi, a forest of tiny, finger-like tentacles that line the inside of your intestines and pull nutrients from the passing food.

But like humans on the world of Pandora, they’re not content to live among the trees. The longer they stay, the more they erode at the life-giving villi. Eventually, the intestinal wall is laid completely bare for long stretches, a condition known as villous atrophy. Give it enough time, and cryptosporidium will corrode the intestines right down to the naked tissue. The most common victims are children.

7 Salmonella Melts Your Bones

Salmonella is one of the most well-known pathogenic bacteria in the world; it’s why you always cook chicken before you eat it. Usually, salmonella stays in the gastrointestinal region, causing a few days of diarrhea and stomach cramps. But sometimes, it goes exploring. And when that happens, you’re in for a rough experience.

For some reason, rogue salmonella bacteria often migrate to the bones, especially leg bones that have a strong blood supply. The bacteria swim through your bloodstream until they reaches the marrow and cause an infection, a condition known as osteomyelitis.

Streams of white blood cells arrive to flush out the threat and begin releasing enzymes that have a very unique effect: They “lyse” the bone, or break down the cells into a fluid. The result is thick pockets of pus where solid bone once stood—prisons for the salmonella, where they’ll eventually undergo necrosis and die.

6 Yersinia Exactly Mimics Appendicitis

Yersinia bacteria are ingenious little monsters. They’re what’s known as facultative anaerobes—they breathe oxygen if there’s oxygen around; if not, a biological switch flips and lets them “breathe” through fermentation. And it all happens inside your body. You usually end up with yersinia after eating salad—the bacteria can survive at temperatures as low as 4 °C (39.2 °F), which lets it thrive on vegetables in restaurant refrigerators.

One of the most dangerous effects of a yersinia infection is pseudoappendicitis, which looks and acts exactly like regular appendicitis. In appendicitis, a major passageway in the appendix gets blocked, and over time the appendix fills with pus and mucus, expanding and putting pressure on the surrounding tissue. Eventually, it bursts, releasing that cesspool of fluids into the body cavities. Yersinia does the same thing, only the bacteria causes the initial blockage that makes the appendix swell.

5 Cryptococcosis Grows Mold On Your Brain

If you’ve ever needed a reason to wash your fruits and vegetables before eating them, here it is.

Cryptococcus neoformans is a fungus that’s found all over the world. Pick up a random handful of dirt and there’s a good chance some of this fungus will be living in it. Now drop that dirt and don’t take any deep breaths, because Cryptococcus is a merciless killer.

The fungus enters your body through your respiratory system, sending a cloud of basidiospores into your lungs and nasal passages. The first thing you’ll feel is a light tickle in your throat that quickly grows into a hacking cough. You’ll get a fever and some of the most intense headaches of your life. The fungus is now spreading across your lungs and releasing toxins into your bloodstream.

After a week or two, the fungus will spread to your central nervous system, sending fingers along your spinal cord that weave their way closer to your brain stem. There, the fungus spreads over your meninges, a thin layer of tissue that blankets the brain. You’ll begin to hallucinate. You may not die, but there’s a good chance of permanent neurological damage.

4 Trichinella Worms Create Colonies Inside Your Tongue

Trichinella is a parasitic nematode that lives in the bodies of omnivores—especially pigs, horses, rats, and humans. Since pigs are the only member of that group we eat regularly, trichinella is usually associated with raw or undercooked pork. And it’s devious.

The worm’s larvae live in cysts in the animal’s muscle tissue. When the animal is killed, packaged, and sent to the grocery store, the cysts hitch a ride down in the meat, waiting for an ideal place to wake up and begin reproducing. More often than not, that ideal place is a person’s stomach. The larvae make their way to the small intestine, latch onto its mucus lining, and begin pumping out babies. In the four weeks they’re alive, adult trichinella can produce more than 1,000 larvae.

These larvae are born diggers—their mouths are equipped with a stylet, a long serrated needle that tears the intestine’s walls so the larvae can swim into the bloodstream. There, they can pick and choose their destination like passengers on a subway. Ideally, they’re looking for thin, active muscle tissue. And nothing fits that description better than a tongue. Sometimes colonies of more than 1,500 worms form gram of tissue. And, sometimes, you never know they’re there.

3 Anisakiasis Forces You To Firebomb Your Own Tissues

In an undersea parallel to pork, squid meat often contains a dangerous parasitic nematode that migrates to humans when it’s not fully cooked. The worm in question is Anisakis simplex, a roundworm that lives in the gastrointestinal tract. Surprisingly, A. simplex by itself isn’t terribly harmful, unless you happen to have an allergic reaction to it. The real danger comes from what it forces your body to do.

Enter eosinophils, our second player in this diminutive drama of death. Eosinophils are a type of white blood cell that are mainly responsible for dealing with parasites. But like a bumbling detective in a David Zucker film, they end up doing more harm than good. Eosinophils mass around the nematodes and launch cytotoxins at them, toxins which do zero damage to the shell of the parasite. Instead, they hit the surrounding tissues and cause more damage than A. simplex could ever dream of doing.

And since the threat is still there, they call in reinforcements, until the entire site is a flashing barrage of crossfire that hits everything but the intended target. And you can die from that.

2 Brucellosis Slowly Rips Your Spinal Cord Apart

There’s a laundry list of alternate names for Brucellosis, including Maltese fever and Bang’s disease. All of them are really the same thing: an infection of brucella bacteria, which is usually found in soft cheese and unsterilized milk. To inject some optimism into this list, Brucellosis is fairly rare, and you’re unlikely to get it if you drink pasteurized milk.

But now for the bad news: It’s a chronic condition that lasts for life, and it can tear your spine in half. See, one of the major complications of Brucellosis is a spinal condition called arachnoiditis, and the combination of those two often leads to syringomyelia, a condition where cavities begin to appear along the spine. The cavities expand over a period of years, forcing apart the spine’s discs and rupturing the whole column along several points. Ouch.

1 The Chicken Superbug Triggers Cellular Suicide

Calling the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that’s being found all over chicken a “superbug” is great for shock value, but it’s really just another version of E. Coli. That being said, it’s still something to watch out for, because it’s causing a surprisingly high rate of hemolytic-uremic syndrome.

Hemolytic-uremic syndrome is the wholesale suicide of red blood cells. Most cells in the body are programmed to be able to self-destruct when needed. It’s called apoptosis, and it usually serves a purpose. For example, when you were still an embryo, your fingers were meshed into a single clump until the cells in between the individual digits underwent apoptosis and allowed your fingers to separate.

But E. Coli contains something called Shiga toxin, which hacks the programming of red blood cells and forces them to commit suicide. The result is near-total kidney failure. Since we’re having trouble stopping this new breed of E. Coli with antibiotics, complications like this are becoming more common. Right now, it’s estimated that about 50 percent of chicken in stores has the superbug.

Who’s hungry?

As a modern culture, we tend to put our faith wholeheartedly in doctors. They’re the experts, and more often than not we take their advice without question. But what we don’t take into account is that many of these doctors either don’t have a clue or actively withhold information that could be putting your life in jeopardy. And if you think that sounds sensationalist, take a look at these facts—facts that doctors know about but which they conveniently forget to mention as you sign the bill.

10 Cancer Isn’t Always Cancer

The worst possible outcome of a trip to the doctor is a diagnosis of the Big C. We’re so terrified of it that even the word is taboo in some places, and the medical community lives by one maxim: early diagnosis. The earlier you find the cancer, the more easily you can treat it. But such enthusiasm can easily lead to false positives, and treating something that isn’t there can be dangerous.

We’re not just making that up. Mammograms are famous for misdiagnosing breast cancer, since every little anomaly in the breast can look like a tumor. The most common misdiagnosis is with DCIS, or Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. Despite the “carcinoma” in there, DCIS isn’t really cancerous ; only rarely does it turn into cancer, and practically everyone with DCIS survives, no matter what kind of treatment they get.

But when doctors quote cancer statistics, they usually lump in DCIS, which now accounts for about 30 percent of breast cancer “cases” in the US. And when faced with that option, most people choose to undergo “needless and sometimes disfiguring and harmful treatments” to get rid of something that, statistically, will do less harm than the treatments themselves.

9Some Vaccines Fail

In 2012, the US saw the worst outbreak of whooping cough since 1955. And that’s strange, considering that we’ve been vaccinating against it for over 50 years. Whooping cough is caused by two types of bacteria, Bordatella pertussis and Bortatella parapertussis, but the vaccine—the DTaP—is only designed to fight the first one, B. Pertussis. Which doesn’t seem too bad. Getting rid of half the problem is better than doing nothing, right?

Not quite. In all these years of exclusively pounding away at one of the causes, the second type of bacteria has been flourishing, to the point that receiving the vaccine causes B. parapertussis lung infections to grow 40 times as large as they would normally. And recently, the vaccine has also been less effective on the things it’s actually supposed to treat. In 2011, the CDC nearly doubled their recommendations for the vaccine, saying you need three initial shots of DTaP followed by three additional shots if you expect it to work.

That’s because vaccines can actually strengthen viruses. They can’t rewire the human genome (and you can dismiss links to autism as alarmist nonsense) but vaccines can stimulate mutations in the viruses they fight. China found that out in the worst possible way when their Hepatitis B vaccines caused the virus to begin mutating twice as fast as it normally would. We’ve been seeing the same thing happen with the flu virus—vaccines basically just fuel the virus’s instinct to survive.

8 Prescription Drugs Can Cause Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is caused when your body either doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t effectively use all the insulin it makes. The result is a buildup of glucose, or sugar, in the bloodstream, which starts damaging nerves and blood vessels over time. About 2.3 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, and the numbers rise every year.

It turns out that some of the most commonly prescribed drugs, like antidepressants, might be causing it. In 2011, there were 46.7 million prescriptions given out to treat depression in the UK alone. When researchers at the University of Southampton looked at the numbers, they found that people who took two of the most common types of antidepressants, SSRIs and tricyclic antidepressants, were twice as likely to develop diabetes. And sure, those findings were released in 2013, but we’ve known about the link since 2008 and yet millions more are prescribed on a monthly basis.

And it gets worse—some of the most common drugs used to treat ADHD in children can triple the risk of type 2 diabetes. More often than not, that’s a lifelong condition, and kids don’t even get the choice to refuse.

7 Some Medications Increase Cancer Risk

Now that we’ve assuaged some of your worries about cancer, let’s go ahead and kick everything back up again.

Blood pressure medications can almost triple your risk of aggressive breast cancer. In the US alone, about 58.6 million people take medication for high blood pressure, so you’d think the cancer link would be more well-known.

The study that discovered this relationship looked at 1,763 women with breast cancer. Those who used a particular type of blood pressure medicine—calcium channel blockers—were 2.5 times more likely to develop cancer. The risk is greater in elderly women over the age of 55, and it likely happens because calcium channel blockers prevent cells from dying. If cells can’t complete their normal life cycle, they go rogue and become cancerous.

But even that wouldn’t be a problem if the medication weren’t so grossly over-prescribed. In a review of one hospital, 150 out of 161 doctors prescribed calcium channel blockers to their patients. But how many of those doctors told their patients about the risks? Only eight. That’s a potentially deadly lapse in duty.

6 Aspirin Can Cause Internal Bleeding

One of the more common pieces of advice from doctors is that you should take a low dose of aspirin every day. The idea is that it serves as a maintenance treatment to prevent blood clots, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. But what they don’t tell you is the small fact that doing so can trigger massive internal bleeding.

Researchers found that, out of 10,000 people, a daily dose of aspirin prevented 46 people from dying over the course of 10 years. But they also found that 49 people out of the same 10,000 experienced major internal bleeding, and another 117 started bleeding in their gastrointestinal tract. So there may be some benefits, but there may be an even higher chance that something will go horribly wrong.

On top of that, aspirin doesn’t actually work for everyone. Some people have aspirin-resistant platelets, which negates any positive effect you might get from the aspirin. But since we have no way to test for that, doctors never know if they’re recommending a dud treatment or not.

5 Heartburn Drugs Have Deadly Side Effects

One of the main problems with medications is that, while they usually do a decent job of treating what they’re supposed to treat, they often cause horrible side effects. And even though it’s the doctor’s job to tell people about those side effects, sometimes that just doesn’t happen. For example, proton pump inhibitors, a type of heartburn drug marketed under the brand names Nexium and Prilosec, have been linked to bone decay, birth defects, and an inability to absorb vitamin B12, which can lead to permanent neurological damage.

Despite that, Nexium was the single most prescribed drug in 2012, and in many cases it doesn’t even work. It’s usually prescribed to treat Barrett’s esophagus, which is when excess stomach acid burns the lining of the esophagus, but the pills don’t do a thing for the condition. Pediatricians have even started prescribing these meds to infants, even though it’s been proven that doing so can actually cause permanent intestinal disorders.

4 “Safe” X-Rays Still Cause Cancer

It’s a well-known fact that gamma radiation and X-rays carry the risk of kickstarting cancer. Now, we’re constantly exposed to radiation just by being alive, so there’s a general guideline for “safe exposure” to X-rays, which the medical profession sticks to when they look for broken bones or give you a mammogram. Radiation is measured in units called sieverts, and every year you’re exposed to about 2.4 millisieverts, just from general background radiation; by contrast, a mammogram only gives you about 0.7 millisieverts.

The difference, though, is that medical X-rays pop that radiation into you in the space of minutes, whereas it takes a whole year to absorb your typical background radiation. And it’s a huge difference, even with low-radiation “safe” X-rays. In the UK, diagnostic X-rays cause about 700 cases of cancer each year. And it could be even worse than that—some researchers claim that the majority of cancer cases were either caused or aggravated by medical X-rays.

And to top it all off, women who get X-rays when pregnant have been found more likely to give birth to children with cancer. And a CT scan is the go-to diagnostic tool for young children, which, you guessed it, is just another type of X-ray.

3 Doctors Get Paid When You Buy Certain Drugs

Conspiracy theorists aren’t shy about proclaiming the evils of Big Pharma. But conspiracy theory is one thing, and documented proof is a whole different beast. When the Harvard Law School took a closer look, they realized that they didn’t have to dig very deep at all to discover that doctors are paid handsomely to prescribe certain drugs, even when those drugs turn out to be harmful.

One of the most publicized recent cases was Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, who began diagnosing two-year-old toddlers with bipolar disorder and prescribing strong antipsychotics that were never approved by the FDA for children under 10. The manufacturer of the antipsychotics paid him $1.6 million. Then there’s Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, who began prescribing an abortion drug to treat depression—he owned $4.8 million of stock in the company that produced the drug.

And then you have Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, who received $500,000 to advertise as safe a drug that can cause seizures and paralysis The fact is, doctors are allowed to prescribe any drug for any illness, no matter what the drug was originally intended to treat. We’re not making a blanket statement saying all doctors take money to prescribe questionable treatments—but how do you know which ones do?

2 Pandemic Scares Are Over-Hyped

Who can forget the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and 2010? When the World Health Organization called for a state of global emergency, the world went haywire. Lines for the vaccine stretched for blocks, and doctors everywhere told people to seek immediate treatment.

Over the course of about 10 months, pharmaceutical companies raked in £6.5 billion (about $10.5 billion in 2010) from vaccine sales. Doctors tied to the vaccine’s manufacturers were 8.4 times more likely to recommend the vaccine to their patients. And not only recommend—they were more likely to publicly hype the dangers of the flu in the media, which immeasurably contributed to the state of panic.

And strangely, doctors who were being paid by pharmaceutical companies were also more likely to volunteer information to the press. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but it’s these quoted experts that we tend to believe in a news article. In the end, about 17,000 people died from swine flu, as opposed to the 46,000 that die every year from the normal flu. Surely the low numbers were due to the mass vaccinations—rather than, say, the fact that the disease was just a common mutation artificially inflated to terror-inducing proportions.

1 Registered Sex Offenders And Violent Criminals

Your doctor doesn’t have to disclose his criminal history, and usually that wouldn’t be considered a problem. Between the strict admission policies of most medical schools and the vague notion that hospitals probably screen their employees, who would even think to ask? Well, maybe you should.

In November 2013, the UK’s General Medical Council, or GMC, released a database with the criminal histories of physicians in the United Kingdom. It turned out that almost 800 practicing doctors held criminal records, including 31 who were arrested for assault and 330 arrested for drunk driving. The rest of them? Crimes range from theft to drug trafficking, and they’re under zero legal obligation to let their patients know about it.

And it’s not exactly rare. There’s the rapist surgeon working in Miami, and the New York doctor who was caught trying to meet a young boy for sex, and a Scottish physician who had reams of child pornography stored on his computer.

Who’s really taking care of you?

Disease is common, affecting every person at some point in their life. However, there are those unlucky few who contract some the rarer diseases—those that seem to do the most damage and are often the hardest to treat, let alone cure. Here are 10 diseases and disorders you really want to avoid.

10 Trigeminal Neuralgia

This particular disorder affects the fifth cranial nerve, one of the most widely spread in a person’s face. Known to hospitals as the “suicide disease,” there are two types. Type 1 is the acute, involving unbelievable pain shooting through the sufferer’s face that lasts for as long as two minutes. These attacks can be joined together over a period of two hours of agony.

Type 2 is less painful than Type 1, but still one of the hardest hits the human body can take. It is constant, rather than sporadic, with a painful burning or electric shock feeling lasting for years. Regular pain medication like morphine has no effect and anti-convulsion drugs often lose their effectiveness. Various surgical procedures have shown mild success, but are rarely anything more than temporary fixes.

9 Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever

First diagnosed in 1967 after an outbreak in a number of labs throughout Germany and Yugoslavia, Marburg hemorrhagic fever is a disease nearly identical to that caused by the Ebola virus. Monkeys who had been imported from Africa were infected and spread the disease while they were being used for polio research. So far, it is extremely rare, with less than 1,000 cases reported to date, and it’s almost always found in Central Africa.

The African fruit bat is believed to be the main source of infection, though how it spreads to humans isn’t quite known at this point. The initial symptoms are extremely close to much more common diseases such as malaria, so proper diagnosis can be quite tricky. If the infection is severe enough, bleeding in the mouth and rectum and neurologic problems arise. Due to the lack of scientific knowledge about the Marburg fever, there is no established treatment, but plasma and blood protein transplants have shown good results. As of right now, the fatality rate is wide-ranging, ranging from 23–90 percent.

8 Cancrum Oris

More commonly known as noma, cancrum oris is a gangrenous infection which attacks the facial tissue of its victims, usually children under the age of 6. Especially prevalent in poverty-stricken areas of Africa, not only does the disease have an extremely high fatality rate (80 percent), but those who survive are left horribly disfigured and often ostracized. Affecting nearly 100,000 children every year, the antibodies in the sufferer’s body get confused and turn on the soft tissue in the cheek, mouth, and nose.

Due to the swift progress of the disease, those infected are quickly disabled, unable to speak or eat normally. The disease has only made brief appearances in Europe and North American since its eradication over 100 years ago, most notably in the Nazi concentration camps. Antibiotics can stop the spread at the first sight of a lesion but they are often unavailable or too expensive.

7 Adhesive Capsulitis

Known by the catchier name of “frozen shoulder,” this disorder causes the sufferer’s shoulder to become so painful and stiff that it is virtually impossible to do anything with their arm. In addition, sleep can be difficult to come by, causing a myriad other health issues like depression and anxiety. As of now, there is no known cause for frozen shoulder, but diabetes and injuries or surgeries in the area are considered to be risk factors.

Frozen shoulder affects an estimated 2 percent of the population at some point in their lives, making it one of the most common disorders on this list, and it is extremely hard to treat. Even with regular medication and constant physical rehabilitation, it can take up to a year to restore mobility. Although there have been cases where it went away on its own, it usually took up to two years to resolve itself.

6 Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

Formally known as “reflex sympathetic dystrophy,” CRPS is a lifelong systemic disease which manifests itself as extreme burning pain, bone and skin changes, and unbelievable sensitivity to touch. It’s one of the most painful diseases in the world, ranked above childbirth and amputation on the McGill Pain Index, a method of evaluating pain developed in the early 1970s. Initially believed to be a systemic failure of the sympathetic nervous system, researchers now believe it is triggered by trauma, especially to the extremities. However, this is just a guess as of right now, which is one of the reasons there is no cure.

Various treatments have achieved a modicum of success, including one brought to us by the wisdom of tech support—“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” In 2003, a 14-year-old girl underwent treatment which consisted of a medically-induced coma with the intent of “resetting” the pain connections in her body. This is generally considered a last-ditch effort, as it carries enormous risk and numerous potential side effects.

5 Aquagenic Urticaria

Aquagenic urticaria is better known as an allergy to water. Though not a true allergy, as no histamine is actually released by the body, the disorder still presents with painful rashes that break out wherever water touches the skin. Usually within an hour after contact with water, the sufferer will end up with small wheals, which are raised, reddened areas also known as papules. It’s an extremely rare disorder, with only 100 reported cases worldwide.

Some scientists believe there may be a genetic component to the disorder, as there has been no evidence of transmission from person to person. However, most cases take place in separate families, with only a few happening to relatives. While some cases can be quite gentle, most are extremely painful, with sufferers resorting to either extremely short baths or none at all in order to avoid the pain.

4 Brainerd Diarrhea

As you can probably guess from the name, this disease is a severe, acute form of diarrhea first described after an outbreak in Brainerd, Minnesota. The exact reason for the contraction is unknown to scientists at this time, but it may be caused by the consumption of contaminated water or raw milk. Sufferers experience 10–20 episodes of explosive, watery diarrhea every day. Nearly all of the recorded outbreaks have taken place in the United States, though there have only been eight since it was first discovered.

Brainerd diarrhea can last for months—even up to a year—with no respite for those afflicted because it’s extremely resistant to any form of antimicrobial treatment. Drugs like Imodium have been reported to offer some relief, but only in very high doses. Because the exact source of the disease is unknown, there is no known preventative measure, other than to boil all well water and avoid unpasteurized milk.

3 Sickle Cell Anemia

Sickle cell anemia is a genetic blood disorder in which the red blood cells form abnormally, taking the shape of a crescent or sickle. In addition, there aren’t enough blood cells to transport oxygen throughout the body. Those afflicted with SCA also lose the defective blood cells up to 12 times faster than those without the disorder.

A mutation in one of the genes responsible for hemoglobin is the root cause of the disorder and it seems to be most prevalent among those whose ancestors lived in areas where malaria was common. The symptoms vary person to person, but fatigue and chronic pain is extremely common and never goes away. Thanks to modern medicine, it isn’t the killer that it once was, with many people making it to their 60s and beyond. However, while blood and marrow stem cell transplants have shown some promise, there is still no cure.

2 Adiposis Dolorosa

For anyone familiar with Latin or the TV show Doctor Who, it will be obvious that this particular disease has to do with fat. Also known as “Dercum’s disease” after the doctor who first described it, sufferers are plagued with tumors called lipomas all over their torso. Nearly all of those who get this disease are obese women between the ages of 35–50.

With no known cure or cause, Dercum’s disease is believed to perhaps have a genetic component to it, as it does seem to run in some families. Other scientists theorize that it is an autoimmune disorder, as healthy tissue is attacked by the body. Tthe only treatments available for this extremely painful condition focus on one symptom at a time, utilizing pain medications and weight loss strategies. Liposuction has shown some mild success at treating the disease.

1 Ondine’s Curse

For those of you unfamiliar with French or German folk tales and mythology, Ondine was a nymph who took a mortal as her lover, who swore that each one of his breaths would be a testament of his love for her. After he committed adultery, Ondine—or her father, in some versions—cursed the cheater to stop breathing the next time he fell asleep. Otherwise known as “congenital central hypoventilation syndrome,” sufferers lack the function of the autonomic nervous system which regulates breathing. This means that they have to consciously remember to breathe.

When they sleep, most are hooked up to ventilators. If they are able to survive into adulthood, the sleep masks used to treat sleep apnea tend to work well enough to enable them to live relatively normal lives. Genetics are believed to play a major role as the cause of the disease, though it has appeared in adults after major surgery or trauma.

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.

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.

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 .

The first English colony in America was abandoned without a word or a trace. When a ship arrived with supplies, they found it deserted with no signs of a struggle. Only one clue was left behind—the word “Croatoan” etched in a tree.

The story of the lost Roanoke Colony has lived on as one of the greatest American mysteries, but the disappearance is far from where the story begins. That story is full of some absolutely horrible atrocities; it’s also one that just might hold some strong clues about the colonists’ fate.

10 The Colonists Burned Down a Native Village Because Someone Stole A Cup

The Roanoke settlers weren’t good people. They viewed the natives as savages, and they treated them like savages, too.

From the moment the colony was established, they built bad blood with the people around them. Shortly before their fort was built, a colonist discovered that one of their silver cups had gone missing. They quickly became convinced that a native man had taken it—and they weren’t going to let him get away with it.

By English law, the penalty for theft was usually whipping, but English law didn’t apply for the natives. Instead, the Roanoke settlers burned every inch of the native man’s hometown to the ground, all because they’d lost a single cup.

9 The Natives Tried To Involve The Colonists In Their Wars

The colony was not a success; they were almost immediately hit by famine and started to starve. The only food they could grow was corn. They had to rely on the help of natives to stay alive.

A tribe called the Secotans gave them food—but they didn’t do it for free. They’d seen the Europeans’ weapons and technology and knew that whoever managed to team up with them would have a major advantage when the next tribal war broke out. The Secotan chief, Wingina, vied for the colonists’ sympathy. An enemy tribe, he told them, had invited some of his people to a peace talk and then massacred them during the feast. He wanted revenge.

The English didn’t want to get involved, so Wingina’s attitude changed. He stopped sharing food with the settlers and told them that he didn’t have enough to spare. Wingina told the colonists that it wasn’t his fault the colonists were starving to death. There was simple reason why: “Your Lorde God is not God.”

8 The Colonists Kidnapped And Ransomed Natives

With their crops dying, the colony resorted to some desperate measures to get food from the natives. The governor, a man named Ralph Lane, was famously cruel. He would regularly kidnap natives and hold them hostage—not because they’d done anything wrong, but because they were useful bartering chips.

The natives weren’t too happy with his approach. One of Lane’s hostages, a boy named Skiko, tried to make a break for it. He ran for freedom, but Lane caught him. He locked Skiko up, beat him horribly, and threatened to cut off his head.

After torture at Lane’s hands, Skiko let slip that the tribes were planning to rise up and attack Roanoke, and Wingina was organizing them. Lane would be the first to die.

7 The Colonists Murdered The Secotan Chief

Lane decided to strike first. He gathered together an armed group and raided Wingina’s camp in the night, slaughtering every person they could find. The Secoans were caught off guard, and the Roanoke settlers ripped through them easily.

Lane spotted Wingina and becokoned him to face him on the shore, man-to-man. Wingina obliged. He rushed at Lane—but was shot in the back by another man. For a moment, he laid still on the ground. The settlers thought he was dead. Then, realizing all was lost, Wingina got up and fled into the forest.

He didn’t get away. A man named Edward Nugent chased after him and emerged from the woods a few moments later, carrying Wingina’s severed head.

6 The Croatan Chief Helped The Colonists Slaughter His Own People

In time, Lane left the colony. He sailed back to England, leaving an artist named John White in charge. Lane’s reign of violence was over, but there were still many more bodies to come.

“Croatoan” wasn’t just a nonsense word; it referred to the Croatan, the only tribe that actually got along with the colony. Manteo, the Croatan chief, was the colony’s most valued guide and interpreter. He was so dedicated to the colony that he was even baptized as a Christian. When the Roanoke tribe (which the colony was named after) became hostile, White sent Manteo out to talk with them, hoping to smooth out some of the tensions that Lane had left.

Manteo returned and reported that the Roanoke tribe had killed 20 Englishmen over the past two years. White was livid. He organized a group of 25 men and ordered Manteo to lead them to the killers so they could get revenge.

Manteo did as he was told, but he accidentally led them to the wrong place. By mistake, he took them to a group of Croatans, living peacefully away from the main tribe, and led the English forces as they massacred his own people.

5 The First English Baby Was Born And Lost At Roanoke

The first English child born in America was born at Roanoke and was lost with the colony. Her name was Virginia Dare, and she was the grandchild of Governor John White.

Just nine days after her birth, though, White left. The colony was still starving and in hostile land. They were in desperate need of aid. If his granddaughter was going to survive, White would need help from the empire.

He brought Manteo with him. The two promised to return within three months, but they didn’t. England was at war with Spain, and the fighting kept White and Manteo from making the trip back. It took three years before they made it back to Roanoke—and by then, it was too late.

4 The Spanish Army Found The Colony

The Spanish Army had heard about Roanoke colony. However, instead of a small group of 118 people, they believed it was a powerful English military base. They were hunting for it, determined to destroy it.

Shortly after White left, the Spanish found it. They’d thought it was in the Chesapeake Bay, assuming that Roanoke Island was too small to contain the enormous army they’d imagined. On the way back from a failed search of the bay, however, a man named Vincente Gonzalez was hit by strong winds—and blown right to Roanoke Colony.

Gonzalez didn’t enter the colony itself, but he found clear proof it was there. He reported his discovery to Spain, pushing for a total invasion of Roanoke.

3 Nobody Actually Tried To Find The Lost Colony

When White returned, the colony was abandoned. White was sure, though, that the word “Croatoan” meant they were safe, hiding with the one tribe that didn’t want them dead.

White wanted to find his family. He convinced the captain to sail to Croatan, but a heavy storm hit, and their food started to run low. Instead, the ships went south to get fresh water, but once they’d restocked, White couldn’t get anyone to go back and help him find his family. White was sent on to Trinidad and then ultimately back to England. He never saw his family again.

Other people tried to look for the colonists. Sir Walter Raleigh sent out teams to find them, but every one turned back due to bad weather before starting a real search. Over in England, Raleigh was soon accused of treason, and the searches stopped.

The Spanish, too, tried to hunt the colonists down. They got word that they were living in the Chesapeake Bay and planned a full assault, but the plan was dropped. Nobody ever saw the colonists again.

2 Archaeological Evidence Indicates The Colonists Joined Neighboring Tribes

James White marked a tiny star on a map of Virginia, so well-concealed that it was only found recently. It marked where he believed his family had fled. It took until 2012 before anyone searched the area White had marked. The archaeologists who did found 16th-century English supplies that could only have belonged to the Roanoke colonists.

There was English pottery, flintlocks, and tools that the colonists seem to have taken with them as they fled to the safety of a friendly tribe. There’s also evidence that they didn’t stay put. Other 16th-century English artifacts have been found at the homes of various tribes on every side of the old settlement.

It seems that the colonists settled into native life. In 1701, a man named John Lawson visited the Croatan. Be then, they had light hair, blue eyes, and spoke fluent English. There was little doubt, he wrote, that the people he saw were the descendants of the lost colony.

1 Pocahontas’s Father Claimed He Killed The Colonists

Fleeing to neighboring tribes might not have been enough to keep the colonists alive. A few years after they disappeared, John Smith landed in the Chesapeake Bay. There, he met Chief Powhatan—best known today as the father of Pocahontas—and learned the fate of the Roanoke colony.

Powhatan’s priests had told him that a great empire would rise from the Chesapeake Bay, and he sent his men to slaughter the tribe living there. There among then, Powhatan said, were a group of white faces, living among a native tribe. The strange sight of white faces among the tribe didn’t stop Powhatan. He murdered every one of the Roanoke colonists he found.

It’s possible that some of the colonists escaped Powhatan’s onslaught, but no survivors were found. For most, the end likely came shortly after they’d finally learned how to live in peace with their neighbors—at the hands of a warlord who hadn’t.

FBI Special Agent John Douglas is the man known as “Mindhunter.” The nickname originates from the 1995 book that he wrote alongside Mark Olshaker. The book profiles Douglas’s creation of the FBI’s Investigative Support Unit, formerly known as the Bureau’s Behavioral Science unit. Douglas and fellow agent Robert “Bob” Ressler interviewed hundreds of killers in order to invent the process known as criminal profiling.

See Also: 10 Murderers Who Did Not Kill Anybody

As dramatically shown on the Netflix series “Mindhunter,” Douglas and other agents dealt with such infamous serial killers as Edmund Kemper, Jerry Brudos, David Carpenter, Robert Hansen, and Wayne D. Williams. Douglas even talked with Charles Manson, the man once widely seen as America’s most infamous inmate.

Besides these high-profile cases, “Mindhunter” the book also dives deep into lesser known crimes and criminals, all of whom Douglas interacted with or chased in one form of another. The following list details and describes some of the more overlooked horrors of Douglas’s groundbreaking autobiography.

10 The Murder of Betty Jean Shade

The 1979 slaying of 22-year-old Betty Jean (Douglas’s book says “Jane”) Shade is depicted in the fifth episode of the first season of “Mindhunter.” Here’s the real story: On the last night of her life, Shade got into a serious argument with her live-in boyfriend, Charles “Butch” Soult, Jr. Despite this, and despite Shade’s determination to break things off with Butch, she still decided to ride in the same car with Butch, his brother Michael, and their sister Catherine. The foursome went to Wopsononock Mountain near the city of Altoona, Pennsylvania.

Hours later, Logan Township police officers Steven D. Jackson and Walter Coho were dispatched to Skyline Drive near the mountain. A local jogger had found the mutilated body of a white female. The body belonged to Shade. Lead investigator Detective Howard Horton, along with Robert Long, Edward G. Pottmeyer, and Barry Bidelspach, were quick to zero in on Butch as the prime suspect. Douglas concurred with this view. Ultimately, Douglas and the Logan Township officers learned that Butch and Mike Soult had raped and murdered Shade. Mike not only sexually assaulted Shade, but helped his brother dispose of her body. Butch killed and mutilated Shade. Catherine Soult helped her brothers to transport the corpse.

The case of Betty Jean Shade was one of Douglas’s early attempts at a criminal profile. He correctly deduced that Shade’s killer was someone from a broken family with a domineering mother. Douglas also correctly predicted that Shade’s killer would be “inept with women”. This matched Butch to a T, as he mutilated his former girlfriend after failing to have sexual intercourse with her prior to her death.

9George Russell Jr.

George Russell Jr. was one of the first murderers to complicate Douglas’s thinking concerning cross-racial sex crimes. Prior to 1991, Douglas and the majority of the American law enforcement community operated under the assumption that lust murderers targeted victims of the same race, i.e. white attackers target white victims or black attackers target black victims. Russell changed the game.

Between 1990 and 1991, Russell, a handsome black male in his thirties, bludgeoned and strangled to death three white women named Mary Anne Pohlreich, Andrea Levine, and Carol Marie Beethe. According to the residents of Mercer Island, Washington, Russell was charming and dated many different women of different races. Even though he had a history of petty theft, Mercer Island police officers had a hard time believing that he was capable of such heinous murders.

The 27-year-old Pohlreich spent her last night drinking and dancing with friends at Papagayo’s bar on June 22, 1990. Hours later she was found beaten to death in her bed by someone using what Douglas calls a “blitz-type” attack style. A similar fate befell the 35-year-old Beethe and 24-year-old Levine. As Douglas writes in “Mindhunter, Russell’s method of overwhelming his victims with speed and violence was not unique. Rather, what made Russell unusual was the amount of post-mortem posing that he did with his victims. For instance, one of the women was left in her bed with a pillow over her head and a rifle inserted in her vagina. The final victim was put in an even more humiliating position, indicating to Douglas that Russell had a deep-seated hatred of women and felt compelled to degrade them.

8 The Murder of Francine Elveson

Francine Elveson was a petite woman—90 pounds and only five feet tall. She was also quiet and shy and suffered from a case of kyphoscoliosis (a curvature of the spine). The 26-year-old spent her days teaching handicapped children, while her nights were spent with her parents inside of their Pelham Parkway apartment in The Bronx.

In October 1979, a young resident of Elveson’s apartment building found her wallet in the stairwell connecting the third and fourth floors. Upon returning the wallet to the Elveson family, it was learned that Francine had failed to show up for work that day. Afraid that something had happened to her daughter, Mrs. Elveson and some of her neighbors searched the apartment building for Francine. They found her at the top of the stairs leading to the roof. Francine was found naked and badly bruised. In fact, Francine’s killer had managed to fracture her jaw, nose, and cheeks. The killer had also strangled Elveson with her own belt and nylon stockings. Other grotesque acts included biting the Elveson’s thighs, removing her nipples, inserting various objects into her vagina, and leaving behind excrement at the crime scene.

Douglas’s profile figured that Elveson’s killer was someone who knew the apartment building well and lived in the area. Douglas also predicted that the killer would have a history of mental illness, would be unemployed or intermittently employed, and a military reject. All of these described Carmine Calabro, the man charged with Elveson’s murder many months after her body was found. Calabro, who pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial, was ultimately convicted of the murder thanks to dental forensics, which matched his teeth with the bite marks on Elveson’s body.

7Carl Stephen Mosely

Carl Stephen Mosely, who Douglas calls “Gregory Mosely” in “Mindhunter,” preyed on vulnerable women. His first victim, 35-year-old Dorothy Louise Woods-Johnson, was a widow who wanted to make friends. On a Friday night in April 1991, Dorothy went to the SRO Country Club in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was there that she met the handsome Mosely. The following day, April 13, 1991, Dorothy’s body was found outside of a housing development. The medical examiner found not only multiple stab wounds on Dorothy’s body, but also found signs of strangulation as well as bruising on Dorothy’s face and throat.

The next victim, 38-year-old Deborah Jane Henley, spent her last night alive at the SRO Country Club too. When Deborah failed to come home that night, her parents called the sheriff. That same day, a farmer found Deborah’s nude body in a cornfield. Like Dorothy, Deborah’s body contained bruises, particularly on the throat and face. Both cases were broke wide open thanks to an anonymous tip, which claimed that Carl Mosely had borrowed a friend’s car on the night of Deborah Henley’s murder. It did not take police long to discover that Mosely had a prior conviction: In 1989, Mosely had abducted and sexually assaulted Laura Fletcher, thus earning convictions for assault with a deadly weapon and second-degree rape.

Two of Douglas’s students, Larry Ankrom and Greg Cooper, profiled Mosely as a sexual sadist with an “inadequate personality.” Furthermore, the FBI agents saw Mosely as obsessed with control and cruelty. After all, Mosely not only mutilated his victims before killing them, but he had also stabbed both women twelve times each on top of penetrating them vaginally and anally.

6Larry Gene Bell

Larry Gene Bell was a soft-spoken killer who enjoyed taunting his victims. Bell was so vile that Douglas devotes an entire chapter to his crimes in “Mindhunter.” During the summer of 1985, Bell was the man who struck fear in the hearts of South Carolinians, especially those with blonde daughters.

At approximately 3:38 p.m. on May 31, 1985, high school senior Shari Faye Smith went missing. After her father, Robert, found Shari Faye’s car setting in the family’s driveway with the engine running, he alerted the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. This would set off the largest manhunt in the history of Columbia, South Carolina—a manhunt that would become a kidnapping case when Shari Faye’s abductor called the Smith family and told them: “Shari Faye was kidnapped from her mailbox with a gun. She had the fear of God in her”.

These taunting phone calls would continue. One of these phone calls led Sheriff Jim Metts to Shari Faye’s body, which was found eighteen miles away from her home in Saluda County. The level of decomposition made it impossible to determine the cause of death, but the medical examiner did conclude that Shari Faye had expired on the same day that she was kidnapped.

After Shari Faye, another victim, 9-year-old Debra May Helmick, was abducted near her family’s trailer located at Old Percival Road in Richland County, South Carolina. Helmick was murdered almost immediately, and the killer called the Smith family again and told them where to find Helmick’s body. Douglas, other members of the FBI, and Sheriff Metts encouraged Dawn Smith, Shari Faye’s sister, to keep talking to the killer every time he called. Eventually the phone number was traced to Huntsville, Alabama, and from there cross-checked with a phone belonging to the Sheppard residence, which was fifteen miles from the Smith family home. The Sheppards were ruled out, but not Larry Gene Bell, their house sitter.

Before Bell’s discovery, Douglas believed that Shari Faye’s killer would be a white male in his late twenties to early thirties. He also believed that the killer had married early in life before getting a divorce. The killer lived with his parents, had been discharged after a brief stint in the military, and was a porn addict. Larry Gene Bell was a divorced loner who did odd construction jobs. He spent less than a year in the Marines before being discharged due to a knee injury, and the first search of his room in the Sheppard home uncovered a “Hustler” magazine.

Bell never confessed to the murders. He died in the electric chair on October 4, 1996. Bell is still considered one of the primary suspects in the 1984 disappearance of Sandee Elaine Cornett, the girlfriend of one of his co-workers, and the July 1975 disappearance of Denise Newsom Porch, who was last seen at an apartment complex not far from where Bell lived at the time.

5 James R. Odom & James C. Lawson

James Russell Odom and James Clayton Lawson met in a mental ward in the mid-1970s. Both were serving time for rape at California’s Atascadero State Mental Hospital. Lawson and Odom passed the time by talking about their future plans. Lawson wanted to kidnap women, cut off their breasts, cut out their ovaries, and stick knives into their vaginas. Lawson wanted to do everything to his female victims except have sex with them. For Odom, the only crime he cared about was rape.

Not long after both men were released back into the civilian world, they hopped into the 1974 Ford Comet belonging to Lawson’s father. Days later, on August 29, 1975, the nude body of a 25-year-old mother of two was found near Columbia, South Carolina. Both of the victim’s breasts had been removed. Her genitals had also been removed as well, while evidence at the scene indicated that the woman’s killers had eaten part of her flesh.

The case of Odom and Lawson, which ended in 1976 with Odom receiving life plus forty years and Lawson dying in the electric chair on May 18, 1976, became one of the foundational case studies for Douglas. In a 1980 article penned by Douglas and Robert Hazelwood, the case of Odom and Lawson was used to describe how sexual fantasies influence lust murderers.

4 Joseph Christopher

On September 22, 1980, 14-year-old Glenn Dunn was found dead in a supermarket parking lot. A day later, 32-year-old Harold Green was shot while eating at a fast food restaurant. Later that same day, 30-year-old Emmanuel Thomas was shot to death outside of his own home. On September 24th, another victim, Joseph McCoy, was shot to death not far from Niagara Falls.

Because of the weapon used, the murderer of these men became known as the .22-Caliber Killer. Eyewitnesses who saw some of the shootings described the assailant as a young white male. This fact led Douglas to believe that the murders were conducted by a “mission-oriented, assassin-style” killer who was motivated by racism (all of the victims were black males). Douglas’s profile was given added ammunition when, on October 9th, a man matching the description of the killer entered a Buffalo, New York hospital and attacked 37-year-old patient Collin Cole. The assailant screamed “I hate niggers” before running away. After months of investigation, the .22-Caliber Killer was unmasked as 25-year-old Joseph Christopher, a private in the US Army.

Douglas and other investigators also proved that Christopher was the man known as the “Midtown Slasher,” an assailant who stabbed four black men and one Hispanic man to death in downtown Manhattan over a thirteen-hour period on December 22, 1980. Prior to Christopher’s capture, Douglas had predicted that the .22-Caliber Killer would be a serviceman who was rational and well-organized, and yet unable to live under Army discipline. This description applied to Christopher, who carried out the murders while on leave from Fort Benning.

3 William Henry Hance

Serial killer William Hance is featured in the third episode of the second season of “Mindhunter.” In real life, Hance was known to the terrified people of Georgia as the Stocking Strangler. Although convicted on solid evidence, Hance’s 1994 execution has been labeled as a “legal lynching” by some advocates because of Hance’s diminished mental capacity.

Beginning in 1978, the Stocking Strangler attacked and strangled six elderly women after breaking into their homes, all of which were either in or near the city of Columbus, Georgia. All six victims were white, and the limited forensic evidence found at the crime scenes suggested that the killer was black. Around the same time, the Columbus police received a letter on US Army stationary signed by seven people calling themselves the “Forces of Evil.” The letter claimed that because the Stocking Strangler was a black male, they would kill a black woman in retaliation. The letter also claimed that a black prostitute named Gail Jackson had already be abducted and killed by the group.

Douglas, who was already working a major serial killer case in Atlanta, believed that the “Forces of Evil” was a deflection written by the real killer, aka the Stocking Strangler. Fellow FBI profiler Robert Ressler, himself a former Army MP, believed that the killer was a black male and an enlisted soldier stationed at Fort Benning. Ressler believed that the killer was either in the artillery or the military police.

After the FBI criminal profile made its way around Fort Benning, 26-year-old Specialist William Hance, who was a member of an artillery unit, was arrested. He confessed to the murders of Gail Jackson, Irene Thirkield, and Army private Karen Hickman, who had been found dead at Fort Benning in 1977.

A year before “Mindhunter” was published, Hance’s name made the national news because of several accusations of racism. Specifically, multiple jurors who had participated in Hance’s second sentencing claimed that racial epithets had been used by other jurors towards Nance and the lone black member of the jury. However, despite these accusations and despite the fact that Hance’s IQ was once tested at 76 (thereby making him borderline disabled), his execution went ahead.

2Wayne Nance

Doug and Kris Wells, who became friends with Douglas, have the distinction of being some of the few people to ever go from serial killer victims to serial killer killers. This strange turn of events occurred on September 3, 1986.

After arriving home sometime after midnight, Doug and Kris Wells found an unknown pickup truck parked outside of their Missoula, Montana home. Doug found that the truck was occupied by a sleeping man. Minutes later, that same man asked Doug for a flashlight. Before Doug could retrieve the flashlight, the man pulled out a gun and ordered Kris to tie up Doug. The man then separated the two. Kris was taken to a bedroom in the house, while Doug was brought to the basement, tied to a pole, and beaten and stabbed with an 8-inch knife. Incredibly, Doug managed to free himself. He grabbed a loaded rifle and made his way upstairs. He shot the assailant once, but did not kill him. When the man fought back, Doug struck him several times in the head. Then, after the assailant fired three rounds from his .22-caliber pistol (one round hit Doug in the leg), Doug seized the pistol and shot the intruder in the head. The man would die in St. Patrick’s Hospital the next day.

The intruder turned out to be Wayne Nance, a native son of Missoula who was born in 1955. Nance knew Kris Wells because she was the store manager at Conlin’s Furniture, the same store that he worked at as a delivery driver. Nance became infatuated with Kris and may have decided on killing her during one working day.

In the years since the attack on the Wells family and the publication of “Mindhunter,” Douglas and Montana police officials have asserted time and time again that Nance was more than likely a serial killer responsible for more than five deaths between 1974 and 1986. Some of Nance’s suspected and confirmed victims include Donna Pounds (1974), Devonna Nelson (1980), Marcella Cheri “Marci” Bachmann (1984), the unidentified woman known as “Christy Crystal Creek” (1985), and the murders of Michael and Teresa Shook (1985).

1 Steven Brian Pennell

Delaware is not known for much besides being America’s “First State” (Delaware was the first state to ratify the US Constitution). But Delaware made the news for all the wrong reasons between 1987 and 1988.

During that time, a serial killer regularly traveled US Route 40 in New Castle County, Delaware in order to abduct and murder women. The first body discovered was that of ex-prostitute Shirley Anne Ellis, 23, who was found partially nude and bound with black tape. Ellis’s killer had hit her several times in the head with a hammer and had tortured her with work tools before strangling her. After Ellis, several more women either went missing or were found dead. These women included 32-year-old Catherine A. DiMauro, 22-year-old Michele A. Gordon, 26-year-old Kathleen Anne Meyer, and 27-year-old Margaret Lynn Finner.

After being called in to consult on the case, Douglas profiled the killer as a white male with a wife and kids. He was also a blue-collar worker who knew how to use tools. Douglas also predicted that the killer knew Route 40 well, and would hunt the area nightly with a “rape kit” prepared in his work van. 31-year-old Seven Brian Pennell, an electrician and a married father, was the man that police were looking for. The Delaware native enjoyed dominating women and fit Douglas’s profile of “macho” man archetype.

Pennell, Delaware’s only recorded serial killer, died via lethal injection on March 14, 1992.

The moment you hit that “Place Your Order” button, a chain reaction sparks, sending a team of warehouse workers and delivery drivers into the frenzy of activity to get your package to your door before the end of the day.

Top 10 Bizarre Things You Can Buy on Amazon

For those of us sitting at home at our computers, Amazon is one of the modern world’s great luxuries — but for the people who make up the cogs of the machine that make it possible, it’s a grueling push in sweatshop-like conditions that wreak havoc on their bodies and their health.

Amazon has been called one of the worst places to work in America—but to see just how bad it really is, we took a deep dive into life is like working inside one of their warehouses.

10 You Can Get Fired By An AI Program

Inside of an Amazon warehouse, it’s sink or swim. Amazon wants its workers to be as productive as their colleagues—and they’re not afraid to fire them if they fall behind.

Their employees track their work with scanners—not unlike the ones you see in grocery stores—that are equipped with a program called “ADAPT”. It tracks how many items they’re scanning, and if you pause even for a second, it tracks it and pushes into an algorithm that can get you fired.

On average, employees are expected to scan a new item every 11 seconds — which adds up to more than 300 items an hour. If you take a break—even to go to the bathroom—the machine starts adding up your “time off task”, and if it gets too high, you’re gone.

Warehouse workers say they’ve seen colleagues who gave five years of their lives to the company sent packing because of their numbers.

So how many people get fired by ADAPT? One warehouse was forced to report its numbers during a lawsuit, and their figures are staggering. That one warehouse alone had let their efficiency program fire 300 full-time employees in a single year.^[1]

9 Workers Pee In Bottles And Trash Cans

When pausing your work for a second can cost you your job, taking a bathroom break can be career suicide. It’s especially bad if you’re nowhere near a toilet — and so some Amazon workers have admitted that, to keep their jobs, they pee in bottles and trash cans.

Not everyone’s willing to take those kinds of drastic measures, but the people who hold it in suffer in their own ways. Some have admitted that they don’t drink a drop of water for their entire 10-hour, physically-demanding shift, while others have held it so much that they’ve developed urinary tract infections.

Delivery drivers are pushed just as hard. They have to deliver so many packages that some have admitted that, to make their orders in time, they defecate in their delivery vans.

Others just speed.

“I had to, the way it was designed. You’re going to have to do that,” one Amazon delivery driver told the press after admitting to driving 120 mph to finish his route before nightfall. “I had a few crashes… but not bad crashes.”^[2]

8 Amazon Workers Get Injured At 4X The Normal Rate

As high as the risk of getting fired might be in an Amazon warehouse, the risk of getting injured is even higher. One warehouse has reported having 422 injuries in a single year — which is more than 4X the industry average.

Amazon’s high injury rate is directly linked to their intense quotas. Demands on workers are so high that many don’t see any way to meet them without taking short cuts — and so basic safety guidelines are ignored just to get those packages out faster.

But in an Amazon warehouse, getting injured is no excuse for taking a break. That’s why their factories come equipped with vending machines that dispense free pain medication to anyone with a work badge, so you can pop a few pills and get to work.

One worker admitted to a reporter that she’s started “popping [Advil] like candy” because of the aches all over her body. It’s probably unhealthy — but before she started popping pills, she says that she’d end up in such horrible pain that she’s collapse onto the warehouse floor and cry.

Another worker, whose on-the-job injuries have left her bulging discs, back sprain, joint inflammation, and chronic pain put it like this:

“I’m still too young to feel like I’m 90 years old.”^[3]

7 A Man Having A Heart Attack Wasn’t Given Help For 25 Minutes

When Thomas Becker had a heart attack in an Amazon warehouse in 2017, he begged his colleagues: “Do not let me die.”

But they did.

His coworkers immediately called their supervisors and asked them to call 9-1-1 for help, but the Amazon warehouse’s management was more concerned about the security of their building than they were about the man who was dying on their concrete floor.

Management demanded everyone present give them their personal information, including their social security numbers and dates of birth, before they called for help.

In the meantime, nothing was done to help Becker. There were defibrillator boxes around the warehouse that could have saved his life — if they defibrillators in them. But instead, they were empty, just pasted onto the wall for show, and so nobody could do anything for him until the emergency responders arrived.

It took 25 minutes for anyone to call 9-1-1 — and when they did, management refused to let them in through the loading dock door that would have brought them directly to Becker. Instead, they had security question the responders at the door, then walked them the long way through the facility, adding another 7 minutes to their response time.

By the time someone finally reached Becker, he’d already stopped breathing.^[4]

6 Amazon Had 6 Deaths In A Year

Becker’s death wasn’t a one-off incident. Two years later, another worker had a heart attack — and once again, the Amazon team left him dying on the floor for 20 minutes before doing anything to help.

Between Nov. 2018 and Nov. 2019, the company had 6 deaths within its warehouses, and they’ve managed to brush off the blame for every one.

The only time they were ever even briefly charged for an employee’s death was after an Indiana worker named Phillip Lee Terry was crushed to death by a forklift in 2017. Terry was a former marketer with no experience with heavy machinery, but when he got a job at Amazon, he was almost immediately put in charge of riding and repairing forklifts.

He was given no training. A co-worker gave him brief, verbal instructions, but that was done entirely off-the-record. Terry didn’t know the proper safety precautions required to work on a forklift — and so, when trying to repair one, he ended up crushed by a 1,200-pound metal platform.

Courts briefly ruled that Amazon was at fault, and, for Terry’s death, fined the company — which had made $72.4 billion in profit that year — $28,000.

But even that was brushed aside. Amazon appealed to Gov. Eric Holcomb, who was trying to convince them to bring their next headquarters to Indiana, and — hoping to lure in their business—he waived the fine and absolved them of all blame.^[5]

10 Companies That Treat Their Employees Even Worse Than Amazon

5 Amazon Robots Have Sprayed Workers With Bear Repellent Multiple Times

An Amazon warehouse made national news in Dec. of 2018 when a robot punctured a bear repellent can, spraying every employee within range with a type of mace meant to be used on a 600-pound beast.

50 workers got sick, 24 of whom were sent to the hospital and one of whom was brought into intensive care. It was horrifying — but as reporters started looking into it, they quickly realized that it wasn’t even the first time it had happened.

Earlier the same year, another bear repellent can had been dropped to another Amazon warehouse floor, once again exploding and spraying an entire team. And a few years before that, a robot had sprayed its colleagues by running over yet another can of bear repellent.

That’s three times in just a couple of years that a factory full of Amazon workers just trying to make a paycheck got bear spray in their eyes — and every time, it was because of a robot that just wasn’t programmed to be careful enough.^[6]

4 Amazon’s Pickers Walk 20 Miles A Day

“Stowers” and “Pickers” — the people who collect the merchandise and bring it to the conveyor belts for packaging — have to do a lot of walking. In fact, it’s pretty normal for them to walk up to 20 miles a day.

Amazon’s tried to sell that as a positive. They even have a training video in which an employee boasts that she’s lost 20 pounds from all the walking — but for the workers, it’s not exactly fun. Most of the walking is done on concrete floors, leaving employees in so worn down that they tend to rely on the pain meds in those vending machines to get through a day.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck,” one worker told a reporter, before admitting that she takes a minimum of four pain pills a day.

Amazon’s defense is that they’re trying to do away with these jobs and replace them with robots — but the statistics show that the robots just make things worse. In factories that have robot stowers and pickers, the employees packaging are forced to put through items three to four times as quickly, putting intense strain on their bodies.

Keeping up with the robots is even more brutal than all that walking — and, as a result, injury rates are even higher in Amazon factories that use robots.^[7]

3 Workers Put In Mandatory 60-Hour Weeks

During the off-season, Amazon workers have fairly normal hours. They usually put in four 10-hour shifts each week, giving them a standard 40-hour work-week. But when the holidays come, work becomes nothing short of brutal.

From mid-November to the end of Christmas, Amazon workers are required to do mandatory overtime, working 60 hours a week.

There’s no way out of it. The warehouses put a freeze on time off requests when the holidays come near, and anyone who tries to call in sick can get fired for taking too much unpaid time off.

Injuries skyrocket during these holiday rushes, according to an independent study of Amazon’s injury claims. The workers are pushed so hard and given so little time to rest that their bodies just can’t handle the strain.

“It’s like doing 11 1/2 hours of cardio five days a week,” one worker has said. “You’re going up and down stairs, squatting down, getting on your knees, getting back up.”

“For the 60-hour workweek,” another says, “you’re a slave.”^[8]

2 Amazon Workers Demonstrate Suicidal Tendencies

Reporters for the Daily Beast reviewed 9-1-1 calls from Amazon warehouse and found that, between Oct. 2013 and Oct. 2018, emergency responders were sent to Amazon warehouse to intervene in suicide attempts at least 189 times.

The key word there is “at least”. Their investigation only looked at call logs for about ¼ of Amazon’s warehouses in the US, and it didn’t look at any in other countries — and so 189 is only a small fraction of the real number.

These workers get suicidal for a wide variety of reasons, but almost every one can be traced back to Amazon’s quota system.

One call came from a woman in Florida, who said she was “going to go home and kill herself” because she’d been fired for inefficiency; another came from a man who was considering hurting himself because of “all the demands his employer has placed on him”; and a third just outright told police she was planning on either “[running] her vehicle into an 18 wheeler or cutting her throat.”

“It’s this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence,” one former employee told them. “[It’s] mentally taxing to do the same task super fast for 10-hour shifts, four or five days a week.”^[9]

1 Amazon’s Solution Is To Replace Everyone With Robots

So how’s Amazon going to deal with being called one of America’s worst workplaces? Simple — by firing everybody and bringing in machines.

Amazon is actively working to replace their staff with machines. They recently announced a set of robots designed to replace their packers, and they’re already planning on using them to get rid of 1,300 warehouse workers in American alone.

But that’s only the first step in a bigger plan. Down the road, Amazon’s actively looking into just replacing every single human being in the entire factory. One Amazon Director told a business magazine that the company is “10 years away” from being able to create “lights-out”, human-free warehouses.

The only reason they haven’t done it already is that the technology doesn’t exist yet.

“There’s a variety of technology that’s come out,” the Amazon director bemoaned, “but it’s not close to where we need it.”

But in another 10 years or so, all of these Amazon complaints will finally go away — because all of the workers will have been replaced by machines.^[10]

Top 10 Innovative Products Of The Last Decade

In ancient Rome, the general rule was that slaves could be freely tortured. In fact, it was highly recommended that any free man accused of a crime would have his slaves tortured in his place, often to the death, so that a verdict could be reached. That didn’t stop Rome’s elite from torturing the free men and women of their country, though. There were always loopholes in the laws of ancient Rome, and the elite rulers exploited each and every one of them.

10 Sewn Into a Donkey

If you’re looking for cruel and unusual forms of torture, you don’t have to look any further than ancient Rome. Take, for instance, a torture that was described by both Apuleius (The Golden Ass) and Lucian (Lucius, or the Ass):

A donkey would be killed, its belly sliced open, and the entrails removed. The accused was then stripped of clothing and stuffed into the animal’s belly. The belly was stitched closed, leaving only the accused’s head outside, preventing suffocation but prolonging suffering.

The donkey’s body was kept in the sun. It would begin to decompose—with the living victim inside being cooked by the heat. Maggots would crawl all over the accused, and vultures would peck at the animal’s decaying flesh. Death, while welcomed, came slowly for the victim of this torture.

9 Fed to Wild Hogs

Saint Gregory described a heinous torture that was performed on young women by the people of Heliopolis while under Roman rule:

Any virgin who was to undergo this torture was first given to the gladiators. After the young woman was no longer a virgin, she was publicly stripped, and her belly was sliced open, spilling her innards out. Handfuls of barley were stuffed into her, and she was sewn back up—only to be given to wild hogs. She would then be torn apart.

8 Cut Off

In ancient Rome, the higher your status, the more people you were allowed to bone without consequence. For example, the emperor would get it on with anyone he wanted. A general could make a move on a lieutenant or a common citizen, and soldiers could go after common citizens.

Climbing up the social ladder was forbidden. If a common citizen decided to penetrate an unwilling soldier, the punishment was public castration. If the soldier willingly allowed the common citizen to penetrate him, he would be publicly disemboweled.

These rules, coupled with true love between men, really muddied up the waters. It was easy for anyone to accuse a man of breaking rank or willingly giving in to penetration by a man of lesser status.

7 Poena Culle

The Romans also ushered in the use of the poena cullei, meaning Penalty of the Sack. The criminal was sewn up in a basic leather sack—and drowned, with death being the ultimate goal. The general consensus is poena cullei first appeared in Titus Livy’s History of Rome. In it, Livy describes how Marcus Publicius Malleolus was sewn into a sack and thrown out to sea in 101 BC for killing his mother. Livy’s version of events appears tame compared to later versions of the punishment, which included the use of live animals.

According to Emperor Justinian’s laws from AD 530: “This is not execution by the sword or by fire, or any ordinary form of punishment, but the criminal is sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and in this dismal prison is thrown into the sea or a river…” Luckily, the ancient Romans reserved this rarely given punishment for parricide—killing a parent or other close relative.

6 Tortured Senator

Emperor Caligula was just as cruel as old Tiberius. At one point, he had a senator slit open. The senator survived, and Caligula ordered that his eyes be removed. After that, hot pincers were used to take out his internal organs. To add to the degradation, the senator was cut in half and torn to pieces.

According to Roman belief, death was not a punishment, but a release. The torture was punishment, and death was only allowed after a certain amount of pain and terror had been felt.

5 Nailed Into Barrels

Some people were meant to suffer longer than others before the sweet release of death. Under Emperor Domitian, Christians were tortured in the most horrific ways.

One of the most disgusting tortures performed involved smearing a Christian in honey and milk. The victim was then nailed into a barrel and force-fed parasite-ridden food. The parasites feasted on the insides the of victim, whose body began to rot inside the barrel. After about two weeks of this torture, the victim would finally die and become a martyr for the Christian religion.

4 Buried Alive

Emperor Nero took delight in having people buried alive. He almost exclusively saved this punishment for vestal virgins who broke their vows of chastity. In one account, Nero forced himself on the priestess Rubria. For her punishment, she was entombed inside a small cave and left to starve to death.

Another torture supported by Nero involved the accused digging his own grave. After it was dug, a stake was set inside the grave. The accused was then bound and pushed into the grave. If his crime were minor, he would be pushed so that the stake pierced through his heart. Anyone convicted of a heinous crime was pushed so that the stake mortally wounded him. He was then left to die in excruciating pain or was buried alive.

3 Eaten Through the Middle

Executioners often used animals to carry out their barbarity, as was the case with the cauldron torture. For this particular cruelty, a starved animal, such as a rat, a dog, or a cat, was placed inside a small cauldron. The opening of the cauldron was then fastened to the belly of the accused.

The executioner would hold a flame to the back of the cauldron, making the inside extremely hot. The animal would panic and try to escape. The only soft “ground” for it to dig its way out was through the belly of the accused.

2 Bee Basket

One bizarre form of torture involved stripping a person down and stuffing him into a large, loosely woven basket. The basket was then hoisted up into a tree containing a large, active beehive. The bees were quickly angered, and the person inside the basket was then stung to death.

The accused was meant to suffer in agony for as long as possible. However, there were cases where the victim of this torture died relatively quickly due to being allergic to bee stings.

1 Crucifixion

Ancient Romans loved a good crucifixion. It was at one time the primary method used to tortured and kill countless numbers of slaves.

Crucifixion didn’t always involve nailing the accused to a cross. Sometimes, the accused was stripped, his head was covered, and he was tied down onto a cross or fork. He was then flogged, sometimes until he died.

If the accused was not supposed to die by continuous flogging, the next course of action involved nailing his hands to the cross beam. He was then hoisted onto a planted post, and his feet were nailed to the post. He might be left there to die a slow death, or his thighs might be broken to help speed his end.

In some cases, the accused might be hung upside down on the post. Other times, the executioner had the post driven through the accused’s private parts. The methods used differed from executioner to executioner, with no one set method of crucifixion for all.

Elizabeth spends most of her time surrounded by dusty, smelly, old books in a room she refers to as her personal nirvana. She’s been writing about strange “stuff” since 1997 and enjoys traveling to historical places.