WeirdMedical™

Some of the most weird and heart-warming stories of 2010…

Mother’s touch revives premature twin pronounced dead…

“Kangaroo Cuddle”

Afghani teen receives nose transplant in California…

Afghani Teen Harmed by Family

All 33 Chilean Miners Survive Ordeal…

All Chilean Minors Survive

…and seven more…

Thank you, AOL, TIME, LWA, AP, Getty Images & Youtube.com!

Welcome home to our Atlantis Space Shuttle and and the STS-132 mission crew!

Just over 10 hours ago Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL, concluding its 32nd and last voyage as a space workhorse. According to NASA it went as “smooth as silk.”

Upon the routine arrival inspection, the shuttle is reported by NASA engineers to be in fine repair, after 25 years reported to have the capacity to easily double the miles it has already logged – 120 million miles. [Seattle PI.]

Space Shuttle Atlantis The Space Shuttle Atlantis is towed back to the Orbiter Processing Facility after landing on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Click picture.

This fact makes it all the more difficult to fathom. It is beyond weird that our space shuttle era is coming to a close, retiring Atlantis first, then Discovery and finally Endeavour at the end of this year.

These spacecraft, their mission teams and crews have allowed us to dream we are astronauts, exploring one of our last frontiers, or engineers, enabling that exploration.

Let our medical industry salute NASA’s vast team of astronauts, engineers, aerospace professionals and its supporting industry suppliers as the STS program winds down.

…and let’s give one more pitch to President Obama – to rethink retiring this program to wait until the mid-2030′s for the Mars program, else the loss of  yet anther critical national treasure further tarnishes our nation’s hope for the future.

Now this is a good use of our federal tax dollars…

In the northwestern reaches of Washington (D.C. that is) sits a museum that is a “must see” if you like the slightly off-taste, arcane, twisted and in some cases, down-right gross medical oddities. Visit the bricks and mortar “Roadside America of American medicine,” the National Museum of Health and Medicine, America’s oldest taxpayer-funded Cabinet of Curiosities near Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

A row of little skeletons.

At the National Museum of Health and Medicine you can see precariously displayed and disturbingly barely described:

• hanging display of a complete brain and spine, suspended in liquid in an eerily lit glass cylinder
• girl’s head preserved in arsenic
• well-preserved hairball from the stomach of a 12-year old girl who compulsively ate her own hair
• skull with a huge civil war bullet buried in its frontal lobe
• and the list goes on…

To visit…virtually go to the RoadsideAmerica.com Team Field Reporters or National Museum of Health and Medicine, or in real life visit:

6900 Georgia Avenue, Washington, DC

Hours:     M-F 10 am – 5:30 pm, Sa, Su, Hol call ahead

No kidding. This is for real – so when you go to the NMHM in D.C., tell them you want your tax dollars’ worth!

Many of today’s products, medical or otherwise, have weird histories…

Discovery and invention are impossible to predict. As many in the medical and pharmaceutical industry have found, trying to invent a new product, drug or device is often more luck than scientific method. Many inventions have weird histories that include a long series of  trials, errors and changes in purposeful application.

Superglue is one example…

Did you know that Superglue (or as we know it in the medical industry today, cyanoacrylate) was originally developed by a Dr. Harry Coover from a glue to fashion plastic gun sights for the WWII battlefields? The substance proved too sticky for this application but in more recent years he perfected it to secure cold war era jet canopies.  In medicine today, its super sticky qualities has found it a home in liquid sutures and home Bandaid use. Read on about its history and those of other inventions by clicking on the image link below.

9 Oddities in Discovery and Invention (Article Source: ThomasNet - http://news.thomasnet.com/mt41/mt-tb.cgi/1601, Image Source: Wikipedia)