Fun with case reports

O always says I'm such a science geek, and part of the evidence of this is my subscription to the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) magazine, brought to you by the same people who hold the yearly Ig Nobel prizes for weird science. Besides some feature articles, each AIR magazine includes many citations of actual, published papers which are noted due to the bizarre or mundane study that was conducted, humorous names of the people conducting the study, curious titles, etc. As I read through the short descriptions or titles of these papers, I mark some of them to look up at work later. I work in medical commmunications, for a large medical and science publisher, so I have access to a wide range of journal publications (I've worked there long enough to guess [usually correctly] whether one of the citations in AIR is from a journal I have access to at work. I know, it's sad.)

In one of the AIR issues I was reading recently, there was a citation for a case report from the journal Burns, which was titled "Frostbite of the gluteal region." There weren't any further details in AIR, just the title, which is too bad because the story of how the frostbite occurred is quite worth telling. To quote from the article:

Four patients were referred to the regional burns unit in Birmingham [UK], with frostbite on their buttocks. All patients were contestants in a radio-station 'drop-out' competition and were asked to sit on non-insulated dry ice (−74C). The winner was the person who sat on the dry ice for the longest period, and the prize was a pair of tickets for a pop concert. Each of the four contestants sat on the ice for about 90 min, until the competition was stopped, because one of them was experiencing pain.

The 4 contestants were 3 girls and a guy, ranging from 15-30 years old. The 15-year-old was actually the smartest and wore 10 layers of pants and underwear. She had mild frostbite and was treated as an outpatient. The other three were not so lucky.

The other three were only wearing one pair of pants, which got wet as they sat on the dry ice. They took 11 weeks to 3 months to heal, which included treatment in the hospital and surgery.

A good case report wouldn't be any fun without photos. Oh yes, there are photos. They are very not pleasant photos. But I'm gonna share them anyway for those who are curious. I'll at least put just links to them so you don't have to see them if you don't want to. I wouldn't recommend looking at them if you have a weak stomach or have just eaten. No, really. I wouldn't if I were you. I've been feeling queasy just putting this post together. Thank god the photos are at least in black and white.

The burn only a couple of hours after sitting on the ice
Two days after the injury
Three weeks after injury
Four weeks after injury
Beginning to heal
Day of discharge from hospital

I'm sure this was worth some concert tickets. And I think we've all learned that sitting on dry ice for an hour and a half is a Bad Idea.

Just be happy that I didn't have access to the journal that published the paper "Colorectal foreign bodies": "A pictorial review of colorectal foreign bodies and their extraction."