steve barrett

Having that tumor removed makes your mustache more noticeable.

Split tongues are nothing new. The first known, or first photographed, split tongue was in 1996. Shortly after the Lizardman, who’s well known in pop culture, split his tongue in 1997.

“Could you do that for me?”

I wonder how much control each has over the body.

I’m a New Scientist subscriber and I’ve been following this line of research for quite a while now. This whole topic really stems back a good number of years - back to the times when PETA came to be because of early neurological research on primates. The research has been making leaps and bounds over just the last several years as it reaches a state mature enough to engage in experiments such as this.

I read a book called The Mind and the Brain by a brilliant neurologist by the name of Jeffrey Schwartz; the book covered a multitude of subjects but one thing he touched on quite a bit was the cortical maps within the brain - more specifically the plasticity of cortical maps. He spoke of researchers severing the neural connection in the brain to a finger for instance, and then slowly training primates to relearn how to use the affected finger. The research improved our knowledge of both how to map the cortical map for motor skills and also how the brain can change its map over time - even in adulthood.

With this research, we are now finally coming into the age of “smart” prosthetics that behave much in the same way that your real limbs do in everyday life. You simply think of reaching over to grab your cup of coffee - and your arm proceeds to play out the program to do so. As you can see in the video below, the monkey has learned to control a robotic prosthetic arm that has been directly wired into the motor cortical map. This is simply astonishing if you ask me.

A few months ago The Tree Man aka Dede made his rounds on the web and news outlets. His odd growths began after he got a cut on his knee early in life. An American dermatologist decided to investigate and found out that The Tree Man’s disorder was actually a form of the Human Papilloma Virus, or HPV, that had monopolized on a genetic fault that inhibited his body’s immune system from stopping the growths.

Well as an update to the story, Dede has begun treatment to keep his HPV at bay. He has also undergone surgery to remove much of the tough matter that has sprouted from his body. Based on his face in the photos it looks like he was happier with branches coming out of his hands and feet.

You’re looking at the face of Huang Chuncai. A Chinese peasant suffering from a rare case of neurofibroma, which is a tumor with roots buried deep within the nerves. Huang’s tumor only became apparent around the age of 4. The tumor now weighs nearly 15 lbs.

Huang underwent facial reconstructive and tumor amputation surgery in July of 2007. Due to his low income the hospital agreed to lower costs and run some fund raisers for him. Unfortunately the surgery wound up being the first in a series that over the next couple of years should greatly reduce the mass of his tumors and allow him to integrate with society on a level he hasn’t been capable of since his youth.

If you’re ever feeling sad or lonely, think of Huang Chuncai.

A forum user going by the handle of hfingers made a thread on tribalwar, a gaming forum, with some pretty peculiar and disturbing images. According to his post he was bitten on the middle finger of his left hand sometime around April of 2007.

[The photos are] from a spider bite that turned into a flesh eating bacterial infection. 4 surgeries and crazy amounts of antibiotics. It was a life threating bacterial infection and i had between a 106.2 and 104 tempature for 2 days. Scary shit. I just got a few pics from my daughter, check them out.

What a stroke of bad luck, to get hit with such a serious infection because of a brown recluse spider bite. I feel bad for the guy. The photos alone are enough to churn your stomach. It looks extremely painful, the way his entire hand has begun to split form the swelling. eeesh

I have to have surgery again to graft skin from hip to the back of my hand. Then total reconstructive surgery to my finger(multiple surgeries) if it can be saved. I have no feeling in my middle finger on the top side of it but i do have some feeling on the bottom side.

Skin grafts are great for this sort of thing, but I would never want to have to go through something like that. I imagine a skin graft would feel much like a serious burn. I suppose I should leave the speculation to someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Still nasty but coming along. The skin on the back of my hand grew in itself, so need for a graft there. The human body is amazing.

They have to break my finger and straighten it out. Then do a skin graft on top.

So after all this guy’s been through - they have to break his finger to straighten it, THEN do ANOTHER skin graft. Life can be a bitch.

I’m sure the finger will never be the same. Fortunately it seems as though this poor sap is going to be just fine. Mama mia.

For some people, it’s this guy…

I knew a kid like this back in high school. This fellow mentions his odd talent is due to a “lack of collagen.” Collagen is a protein found in flesh that gives it the tensile strength this guy is missing. Collagen is what degrades as you age, leaving you wrinkly and it’s also the same shit they inject into your lips to make them more full; that is, if you’re the plastic surgery type. I stumbled across this video, but it reminded me of another. A video about a real character named Pete Burns. You might remember him from the band Dead or Alive, who’s 1985 hit You Spin me Round. Made him famous. Pete doesnt call himself homosexual, transsexual, transgendered - or any of those things. Whether or not he is those things is somewhat foggy. He’s got a husband and says he’s got a penis but when you see this guy you (or at least I) totally see a woman.To make things even more interesting, Pete Burns had some of those collagen lip implants I was talking about. One day he awoke to find a yellow pus-like discharge oozing out of his lips. Apparently due to some sort of reaction or something from the injection the discharge got worse and worse, in Pete’s own words “Squirting across the room.” Pete suffered two long years of two surgeries a week to repair his face and restore his ability to not only speak - but sing.

“Squirting across the room.”

Pete’s career has changed over the years, once a music star, he’s now become more of an icon. If you’ve ever seen the show Big Brother, you might have seen Pete. He took part in the Celebrity Edition of the hit show that, from what I understand, locks a group of people in a house and films the drama for all to see. During Pete’s introduction on the hit show he discusses his plastic surgery lip ordeal in detail and they even show a couple of WRETCHED photos. Check out the video…

When it comes to a surgical mistake, this incident may take the cake: A 78-year-old German woman went into the hospital last month to have surgery on her leg. Because of a mixup, Frankenpost reports that she left the Hochfranken-Klinik in Münchberg, Germany, with an artificial anus.

Sounds like the doctor’s a real asshole.

via usatoday