The top 5 most horrifying and fascinating medical cases of 2025
Florida man makes two appearances on the list.
Credit:
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
There were a lot of horrifying things in the news this year—a lot. But some of it was horrifying in a good way.
Extraordinary medical cases—even the grisly and disturbing ones—offer a reprieve from the onslaught of current events and the stresses of our daily lives. With those remarkable reports, we can marvel at the workings, foibles, and resilience of the human body. They can remind us of the shared indignities from our existence in these mortal meatsacks. We can clear our minds of worry by learning about something we never even knew we should worry about—or by counting our blessings for avoiding so far. And sometimes, the reports are just grotesquely fascinating.
Every year, there’s a new lineup of such curious clinical conditions. There are always some unfortunate souls to mark medical firsts or present ultra-rare cases. There is also an endless stream of humans making poor life choices—and arriving at an emergency department with the results. This year was no different.
The top five medical cases of 2025 were chosen using a blend of editorial judgment and reader interest. There’s a mix of cases stemming from poor life choices and just plain bad luck. Florida man makes two appearances (we’ll let you guess which of the aforementioned categories he fits into). There’s a puzzling, oozing, explosive vomiting, a bioterror bacterial surprise, and, of course, parasitic worms. Best of all, nobody died—a happy ending we could all use as this year draws to a close.
Without further ado …
5. Man eats dubious street food—ends up blowing apart his GI tract
Street food can be among a region’s best culinary offerings. No one can be blamed for partaking. But, it does come with some risks—namely, food poisoning. An unfortunate 59-year-old man fell ill after eating some street food in China. It wouldn’t be a remarkable story if it weren’t for the degree of trauma his ensuing illness created. The man vomited so fiercely that the force his body created to launch the offending substance up and as far away as possible—presumably to another dimension—blew apart his esophagus (the muscular tube that conveys food between the throat and stomach).
Such organ-shattering is called Boerhaave syndrome, which is rare. If it isn’t treated quickly, it has a 60 percent to 100 percent fatality rate. The man, luckily, received care within a few hours of the blast, though his chest was already filling with fluid and his right lung was collapsing. He was rushed to emergency surgery and eventually made a full recovery. However, it required 35 days in the hospital and an additional three months with a feeding tube before his esophagus completely healed. It remains unclear what street food sparked the detonation, but presumably, it is one he won’t eat again.
4. Burning in woman’s legs turned out to be slug parasites migrating to her brain
For days, a 30-year-old woman in New England experienced searing pain that crept up her body, starting with her legs, then moving up her trunk and to her arms. She went to two different emergency departments seeking relief. But doctors at each found no clear explanation for her pain and sent her home with only a recommendation to see her primary doctor. The condition continued to worsen. After waking up in a mental fog, she was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where doctors discovered that she was infected with parasitic worms.
The pain and burning sensations the woman had experienced moving up her body was from worm larvae traveling along her peripheral nerves to get to her brain. The parasite behind the infection was the nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis, also known as rat lungworm. This delightful parasite typically circulates between rats—its primary host—and slugs and snails. Infected rats poop out larvae, which are picked up by slugs and snails. Late-stage larvae develop in the slugs and snails, then move back to rats, who get infected by eating the infected mollusks. Back in the rat, the larvae make their way to the rat’s brain, where they become adults. Then they relocate to the lungs (hence the name) to mate.
Humans accidentally get infected by eating raw vegetables containing or contaminated by infected slugs or snails, or by eating undercooked creatures that eat slugs or snails, such as land crabs, freshwater prawns, or frogs. In the woman’s case, doctors suspected she got infected from eating raw seafood and salads on a recent trip to Hawaii, where the parasite is a known threat. Luckily, the woman was treated for the infection and made a full recovery.
3. Man gets drunk, wakes up with a medical mystery that nearly kills him
It’s not every day a person gets drunk and wakes up with a medical case so enigmatic that a master clinician with an expertise in medical reasoning is called in to help crack it. But a 36-year-old did just that in a case published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The man showed up at the hospital with abdominal pain, a crackling in his lungs, bacteria in his blood, liver abnormalities, an injury in his small intestine, and a blood clot in his right kidney—and no clear idea of how any of those things happened or how they were connected.
In the case report, doctors lay out how they identified all of the aspects of his condition and then how master clinician Gurpreet Dhaliwal of the University of California, San Francisco, unraveled how they fit together.
Providing a fascinating look into diagnostic sleuthing, Dhaliwal reasoned out that it all came down to beers and a toothpick. The man—who had a history of binge drinking—got drunk, ate something, and accidentally swallowed a toothpick, Dhaliwal surmised. While still drunk, the man aspirated some of the food, causing his lung infection. The toothpick, meanwhile, pierced his small intestine near his right kidney, causing the injury and the blood clot. The injury then became infected, causing sepsis and his liver abnormalities.
After Dhaliwal came to his conclusion, medical imaging found the toothpick. After it was removed, the man made a full recovery.
2. Florida man eats feral pig meat, contracts rare biothreat bacteria
I promised Florida man made the list—and of course, he’s near the top. In this case, a Florida man was gifted the bloody meat of a feral pig, which he handled with his bare hands before cooking and eating it. In doing so, he inadvertently exposed himself to a highly infectious bacterium considered a potential bioterror threat. The man developed an insidious infection that lurked in his heart implant and took doctors nearly two years to properly diagnose.
The bacterium at hand is Brucella suis, which typically infects pigs. The bacterium is not particularly deadly, but it can spread by air and only takes a few bacterial cells to cause an infection, making it a good potential weapon. In 1954, B. suis became the first biological agent to be weaponized by the US government as part of its offensive biological warfare program.
Once the man’s infection was finally diagnosed, he was treated with an effective antibiotic regimen to clear it. He also got a new heart implant and made a full recovery. Unfortunately, due to the high infectiousness of the germ, doctors had to reach out to all the man’s previous health care providers and clinical lab workers to warn them of the exposure. Three lab workers were found to have had a high-risk exposure and had to undergo months monitoring and post-exposure prophylaxis.
1. Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body
While that Florida man’s case was … unusual, it mostly stems to some bad luck—who among us hasn’t occasionally forgotten to check our gifted feral pig meat for bioterror threats? By contrast, this year’s top medical case goes to another Florida man, whose life choices are definitely in question.
In January, we shared the case of a Florida man who adopted a daily diet of six to nine pounds of cheese, sticks of butter, and hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them. He made the medical literature after eight months, when he showed up to cardiologists with cholesterol literally oozing out of his hands, feet, and elbows.
As the cholesterol was trying to escape his body, it created painless, yellowish nodules filled with lipids. The condition is called xanthoma and most often presents with nodules around the eye.
The cardiologists tested the man’s blood cholesterol levels and found that they exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, the target level of total cholesterol for good cardiovascular health is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL or over is considered high.
It’s unclear how things ended up for the man, but at least his doctors did not report that he died—at least not yet. Generally, xanthoma itself is benign; his cholesterol levels, on the other hand, put him at significant risk of cardiovascular disease. Still, he suggested to his doctors that he was pleased with his dairy-heavy diet, which he described as a “carnivore diet.” He claimed he lost weight, had more energy, and improved his “mental clarity.”
With that, we sign off on the medical line-up of 2025 and look forward to what medical horrors 2026 will hold—and what Florida man will do next.
Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
