Weirdest Medical Cases

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Every two weeks, a pick of the most bizarre case reports in JAMA, NEJM, BMJ, and The Lancet — from patients who swallowed an entire book to rare genetic disorders.

Updates upon new events

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-06-29

Six cases that changed the question

A weekly selection of six clinical case reports where the first diagnosis was not the real puzzle — from laser maculopathy and malignant teratoma to VEXAS, kwashiorkor, drug-induced angle closure, and arrhythmia caught on camera.

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-06-22

When Medicine Didn't See It Coming

Five clinical case reports from June 15–22, 2026: a young man who applied a percussion massage gun to his eyeballs for three months and tore both retinas; a patient whose metastatic melanoma vanished entirely after a post-operative infection following open-heart surgery; ophthalmic silicone oil that migrated from an eye into the brain's ventricles and was mistaken for a hemorrhage on CT; a 2026 case of empyema necessitans — a lung infection that dissolved a path through the chest wall; and an elderly man who inhaled Francisella tularensis (rabbit fever) and collapsed into septic shock and multiorgan failure.

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-06-15

Six Cases Without Clean Endings

Six clinical case reports from the journals published June 8–14, 2026: a Lancet paper on a West African woman with VPS13A neuroacanthocytosis — who ate alone, built a doll from leaves, bit herself raw — retracted in 2025 and republished with no explanation; a teenager who survived fulminant flecainide cardiotoxicity on VA-ECMO; an NEJM Image Challenge with a 9-year tropical skin lesion in a pregnant woman from Honduras, still open for voting; a 22-year-old whose erythema multiforme produced textbook-grade oral destruction and then vanished; Takayasu arteritis behind a 14-year-old's hypertensive emergency; and a child with Bardet-Biedl syndrome who developed a definitive AGEP drug reaction — and died.

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-06-08

Six Bodies That Betrayed Themselves

Six clinical case reports from BMJ Case Reports, June 1–8, 2026: a swallowed fish bone that fistulated into a pulmonary vein and sent air bubbles to the brain; hydrogen peroxide wound irrigation that stopped a man's heart on the table; thirteen silent jejunal tumors found only when the surgeon counted; the Leser-Trélat sign — a sudden eruption of hundreds of warty lesions that vanished when the cancer was treated; nivolumab+ipilimumab triggering Graves' disease and thyroid storm; and a woman whose shingles reactivation added a fourth simultaneous autoimmune condition.

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-06-01

When the Body Lies About What's Wrong

Six clinical cases from May 25–June 1, 2026: a patient whose 2-year collapse of movement, psychosis, and self-harm was explained by a disease in fewer than 5,000 people worldwide; a frontal brain mass cured by penicillin; a coal-black airway that wasn't cancer; a gene killing young family members that only a new pacing test could find; a lymphoma patient having 50 bowel movements a day because the cancer had colonized her gut wall; and the human OB/GYN team that crossed the species line to deliver a gorilla by C-section.

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-05-25

Six Cases Where Medicine Had No Playbook

Six clinical case reports from May 17–25, 2026: a lung cancer with an ultra-rare RET mutation that spread across the placenta in the first reported case of its kind; a patient whose esophagus turned coal-black on endoscopy; a right ventricular cardiac tumor that hid behind kidney failure and anaemia; a retina flooded in the "blood and thunder" pattern of central retinal-vein occlusion; a 20-year-old whose routine hip scope ended five years later in amputation for refractory CRPS; and a patient allergic, on paper, to air.

Weirdest Medical Cases2026-05-17

Six Cases That Broke Textbook Rules

Six bizarre clinical case reports from May 9–17, 2026: a syphilitic brain mass mistaken for a tumor, carbonized airways after a house fire, a fatal hantavirus cruise-ship outbreak, roseola destroying an infant's brain, toenail fungus turning lethal in a transplant patient, and a stroke sent home from the ED.

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