Quick thread on what can happen if you hold your nose and mouth and then do a sneeze.

(Sources here: https://t.co/Ksy95o7im7)

You've probably heard the urban legend about what happens if you sneeze with your eyes open.

Well, you'll be pleased to have it confirmed that your eyeballs do not pop out of your sockets like champagne corks.
The air spaces in the nose and throat aren't connected to anything behind the eye, meaning that there's no way a sneeze can create pressure that would force your eyes to shoot out and dangle around like a game of swingball.
However, there are other dangers to sneezing that I wish I didn't know about but I'm going to tell you here because fuck you I guess.
Take for instance a perfectly healthy 34-year-old man who, for reasons unknown, decided to try and block a sneeze by covering his mouth and holding his nose at the same time.
I like to think that his wifi went down one day and in the boredom he merely thought "yeah fuck it I'll give internal sneezes a go then".
In a case written up in BMJ Case Reports under the rather distressing title "snap, crackle and pop: when sneezing leads to crackling in the neck", doctors write that the man showed up in the emergency department after an achoo gone wrong.
As the patient had pinched his nose and held his mouth closed when he sneezed - probably thinking he was about to make billions on his new invention of the silent sneeze - he had experienced a "popping sensation" in his neck.
As distressing as that sounds, it soon got worse when he experienced painful swallowing, pain in his throat and a "change of voice". Imagine sneezing, you feel a pain and ask for help and your colleague asks "why the fuck are you talking like Joe Pasquale".
Upon examination, it was discovered that his neck down to his ribcage made popping and crackling sounds, a sign that he either had air bubbles inside his deep tissue and muscles or was harboring two thirds of the Kellogg's Rice Krispies trio inside his chest cavity.
Which are equally distressing.
Figuring that it was more likely the former (known as Hamman’s sign, crackling can occur when the heart beats against tissue filled with air) they ordered a scan of his soft neck tissue and chest.
This soon revealed the problem: during the act of suppressing his sneeze he had ruptured the back of his neck.
The rupture - which is more often caused by blunt neck trauma, profuse vomiting and heavy coughing - had caused a collection of air to leak into the retropharyngeal region (see the arrow in the scan above), causing his pain and loss of voice.
Fortunately, the man was able to recover from the sneeze in hospital. He was given a feeding tube and monitored, and given intravenous antibiotics as a precautionary measure.
He was later discharged, but not before he was advised to avoid obstructing both his nostrils while sneezing, probably while muttering "you complete fucking pie" under their breath.
"Halting sneeze via blocking nostrils and mouth is a dangerous manoeuvre and should be avoided," the team note. "It may lead to complications such as pneumomediastinum, perforation of tympanic membrane and even rupture of cerebral aneurysm," the team write in their report."
Basically, sneeze like a normal person if you don't want to do a dead.
If you like this thread, my book is currently HALF PRICE
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Wondering whether I should do a thread about what happens if you hold in a poo for too long

More from Health

Now you know I love to sh-t in Harvard. But I also like accuracy. So I decided to go look at Harvard’s catalog to see its lack of military history that this article describes (they only teach history of pets it claims) and what I found shocked me! Shocked me! A thread: 1/


First off, Harvard students literally have multiple sections of military history that they can take listed. (It appears these ones are taught at MIT, so they might have to walk down the street for these) but... 2/


Say they want to stay on campus...they can only take numerous classes on war and diplomacy...3/


They have an entire class on Yalta. That’s right. An entire class on Yalta. 4/


But wait! There is more! They can take the British Empire, The Fall of the Roman Empire for those wanting traditional topics... 5/
Before we get too far into 2021, I thought I’d write a thread recapping some of the research that came out of my lab in 2020. Most of this work was led by my talented team of graduate students, Kerrianne Morrison, @kmdebrabander, and @DesiRJones.

Back in January, a news story was published about Kerrianne’s study showing improved social interaction outcomes for autistic adults when paired with another autistic partner.

A detailed thread about the study and a link to the paper can be found here (feel free to DM me your email address if you’d like a copy of the full paper for this study or any of our studies):


Another paper published early in 2020 (it appeared a few months earlier online) showed that traditional standalone tasks of social cognition are less predictive of functional and social skills among autistic adults than commonly assumed in autism research.


Next, @kmdebrabander led and published an innovative study about how well autistic and non-autistic adults can predict their own cognitive and social cognitive performance.
This is the $1mln question still without an answer: why were these workers cleaning bat guano from that abandoned mine?

Surprisingly we simply don't know.

China would have all interest in clarifying that point if for instance they were prospecting or selling guano. It did not.


What we know is that EcoHealth + WIV were sampling bat sites in the vicinity at the exact time of the workers being in that mine.

#DRASTIC wrote about this and about other oddities in the official story:

Maybe it's just one of these coincidences.

Then it gets interesting: about a year after the miners death, Olival & Epstein from EcoHealth Alliance co-authored a paper about the coronavirus risk infection from bat guano collection.

No mention of the

That paper oddly used some old bat samples collected by DARPA in 2006/7 at the famous Thai bat cave.

It never mentioned that the Thai monks have been doing this every Sunday for many many years without infection.

But most interestingly it never mentioned the Mojiang mine accident, even if the perfect timing and recycling of old DARPA bat samples seem to point to a likely knowledge of it.

Anyway, the idea was to ask for more money, as you correctly

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