Do you remember what your parents used to tell you about covering your mouth when you sneezed, and washing your hands afterward as a child?
Well your mother was alright right of course, but about things she’d never imagine, and things you’d never want to imagine!
With the advances of modern medicine, we know all about how bacteria work, and how they can get inside of us to make us sick. That isn’t news, but this is…
On August 18th, 2015, the first documented clinical case of a man sneezing himself into a prostate infection was published on the National Library of Medicine, which is the government’s online catalog of clinical studies.
The Sneeze
The subject was a healthy 39 year old man with no history of chronic illness. While urinating, he sneezed, and experienced some brief pain, but this passed without incident and he finished in the bathroom without incident.
Something crawled up there though, and before the end of that very night, he had sudden symptoms of prostatitis- Frequent urination every few hours, getting up to urinate at night. He developed painful burning urination, headache, and eventually haematuria… That’s blood in the urine. 3 days after the sneeze, and the blood in the urine… He finally went to the doctor.
The Diagnosis
He denied experiencing flu-like symptoms, but in the doctor’s office he had a fever of 99 degrees. A Digital Rectal Exam confirmed that he had… And this is a quote directly from the case file… “A tender, boggy prostate.” His IPSS and QoL scores were on the unhealthy side of where a prostate should be, and blood and tissue tests came back loaded with bacteria.
The Treatment
Doctors put the patient on an antibiotic medication, and his prostate infection cleared up in a month.
How Did It Happen?
In the article itself, the doctors propose a scientific explanation for the cause of the infection. The shorter version is this- When you sneeze, you do certain things involuntarily, like closing your eyes, or stopping your urination. In the case of this man, doctors suggest that he sneezed so hard he temporarily stopped his urine flow, and it backed up his urethra into the ducts on his prostate.
The prostate is the organ that adds seminal fluid to semen and funnels it into the urethra during the male orgasm. The backed up urine got into these pipes, festered, and infected the subject.
You can read the whole article for yourself on the goverment’s website, pubmed, here.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4556327/
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