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Some personal care products, such as lipsticks and moisturizers, contain the same cancer-causing chemicals found in cigarettes. Foods like chocolate and peanut butter contain rodent hair.
There is a giant, deadly hornet with venom so strong that it is known to “melt” human flesh. It claimed 42 lives in China in 2013.
There are many more terrifying realities out there that may stir up your curiosity for all things macabre. It’s why Reddit threads like this one remain relevant after a few years, as it bears a hard-hitting question: “What is a disturbing fact you wish you could unlearn?”
From tonsil stones to the brutal realities of schizophrenia, here are the most popular replies.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
The fact that most people don’t want to be around when their pets are put down. Vets have stories about like 70% of the pets they put down being scared and looking for their humans and not seeing them, and dying in afraid and alone. This haunts me.
m pum 1 month ago
Vet tech 25+years. Only once have I judged a client who didn't stay for the euthasia. He was a d**k in general and didn't give a s**t about his dog in general. Of the probably thousands I've been part of a side from that one, the small handful of those that didn't stay there was zero judgement. That's why we are there. We love on them. Snuggle them. Give them a last delicious snack as they cross over. Cry for them. Nobody knows what others are dealing with and why they can't handle it.
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#2
Sometimes, old people don't break their bones because they fall... They fall because they break their bones.
#3
Most schizophrenics k**l themselves during a lucid period. I leaned that fact, but I regret the day I *understood* it.
I'm a Psychiatrist (MD) and, during medical school, I had the privilege of working at a NGBRI building as part of my psych rotation. My very last day, I stayed late to check up on a man with schizophrenia who was generally pretty disorganized. When I was questioning him, he seemed more lucid, and he mentioned something about studying literature. Having recently been half an English major in college, I engaged him, and he started rhapsodizing about Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, really insightful comments. Then he moved on to music - Jazz especially. I spent an hour after my shift with that man, just listening.
I passed an attending when I went to write my notes, told him what had happened, awe and joy in my voice. He informed me that the man was a former professor, had two PhDs. He said that many people with severe mental illness are "living in one, two rooms of a mansion, and once in a while, the lights come on in the rest of the house, and you can see what it once was."
And so can they.
Hippopotamuses 1 month ago
"Most schizophrenics k**l themselves during a lucid period." Lets pretend that this word doesn't exist. That will help people in need know that it's a taboo subject, and that they should hide it from the world. Because it's f.u.c.k.i.n.g wrong to have those feelings!
#4
Over 820 million people worldwide suffer from chronic hunger, despite there being enough food to feed everyone on the planet.
#5
That one million seconds ago was last week, while 1 billion seconds ago was 1988.
anon:
That's a good way to show people how much wealth billionaires truly hoarde.
Marilyn Holt 1 month ago
and no matter how fast you count from the moment you're born, you'll never get to one trillion seconds
#6
Tldr: Don’t retire in Vegas.
In some states in the USA particularly Nevada, your doctor can basically “sell” you to a company. If you’re a senior with an untrustworthy doctor they can throw “memory loss, hysteria, confusion” etc on a piece of paper and hand it over to a company. This company can claim guardianship over you without you ever meeting or hearing of them. And they can take you out of your house, sell your house and all of your belongings, put you in a nursing home and have full control over your finances. They can force you to take medication every day for the rest of your life that make you confused and unable to think clearly, until you die. They can bar your family from visiting you as well. And it’s all 100% legal. Before you even find out it’s happened to you, there’s already been a court hearing where the judge is persuaded into signing your life into some stranger’s hands based on your doctors false claims.
Not that I want to unlearn it though. I think more people should know about it.
Peeka_Mimi 1 month ago
I have a friend, my age of 51yo, and he had a stroke. They did this to him and he's stuck in Montana. They warehoused him in a nursing home. No idea how to help him break free. I don't have money for a lawyer. It's really sad.
#7
There’s such a thing as fourth, fifth, and sixth degree burns.
Fourth degree means all the layers of skin at the burn site are gone.
Fifth degree means the muscle under the skin is damaged.
Sixth degree is literally down to the bone.
Yeah... I was a lot happier thinking third degree was the worst.
#8
Manatees have v***nas that are the most anatomically similar to humans.
Manatees may also be the inspiration for myths about mermaids, beautiful half-fish women that lured sailors to their deaths.
Connecting those dots has been mentally scarring.
#9
There are corpses on Mount Everest which are used as waypoints.
Hey look! There is no limbs Dereck, I guess we’re going the right way!
#10
Surgeons used to operate on infants without anesthesia, including open heart surgery. They have stopped this, however. In the 1980s.
Laura Gillette 1 month ago
I seriously do not understand how the medical community thought babies couldn't feel pain. Why are they screaming, then, doctor??
#11
There is a phenomenon known as “stone baby” where a fetus dies and doesn’t get absorbed by the body, so it calcifies inside the mother’s abdomen. People have been known to carry around these mummified fetuses for 40 years, totally unaware.
#12
My biology teacher had a Q&A session before Christmas and one student asked if its possible to be allergic to your own blood. Unfortunately you can. Just imagine your own immune system destroying your red blood cells, constant hemorrhaging, constantly feeling cold and out of breath. When we got back from winter break we saw a new face in class, a former student of my bio teacher who just so happened to have this disease and we spent the whole class asking questions. I feel so bad for the guy but thankfully the medicine available to suppress the immune system has made his life bearable.
#13
Tl;dr I had a brain injury and I'm not the same. I wish I didn't know.
I wish I could forget the fact that I'm different from who I used to be. After receiving a brain injury in February 2020 I have both forgotten and relearned many things (even how to read).
I've recovered massively, but many of my old passions have become frustrating to me. I struggle reading maths, code, dense text etc. whereas I used to enjoy leading projects with friends and teaching others about Maths and Science. Although frustrating, I enjoy challenging myself to relearn these things and aim to return to my past skill level.
The real scary part is that I've fundamentally changed as a person. If I remember back to before the accident it's a different person to me. He (me?) acts in ways so alien to me that I feel I so sure never would have acted. Nothing to be ashamed of, they just weren't me. Very real relationships that I still feel strongly in my heart link to memories that feel completely fake to me, as though I'm watching some kind of movie. I even doubt their accuracy.
A person I considered a father figure and close friend passed away just before my accident and I spent my time in rehab not able to properly mourne. Sometimes I'd forget he'd passed away and other times I'd feel like an imposter for inheriting such important items from him. To me it's like I'm tarnishing his legacy. I know he wouldn't think that, but I want to be the old me again, since I can't - I wish I could at least forget that I've forgotten and changed so much.
#15
Forgive my unscientific terminology, but basically there is a female whale (maybe a blue whale or a sperm whale? I don’t remember the species at all) who was born with some type of genetic defect or physical/anatomical abnormality (something like that) that causes her vocalizations to be produced at a different sound frequency than the other whales of her species. Because of this, the other members of her species cannot hear or perceive her vocalizations, so this poor whale has spent her whole life wandering through the world’s oceans all alone, trying unsuccessfully to communicate with other whales who basically don’t even know she exists.
EDIT Shoutout to u/Shadow_And_Polish, as well as several others, who did a little research and shared with everyone that this particular whale is called Whale 52, because the sound frequency of her vocalizations is 52 Hz. Yay knowledge! Double yay for knowledge sharing!
#16
When the Challenger exploded in 1986, the astronauts didn't die from the explosion. Nor did they die from depressurisation as NASA has initially claimed. (There is some evidence they turned on their personal oxygen supply.) They died from impact when they hit the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
They were in free fall for two and a half minutes.
#17
Parrots often bond with a keeper, from their perspective, as a lifelong romantic partner. If the person dies, or the parrot is displaced, they can go into massive depression and pluck out their own feathers.
#18
Every day, approximately 150 species of plants and animals go extinct due to human activities.
#19
Brigham Young University experimented on homosexuals. These experiments involved placing electrodes on their testicles, ect.
These were done far more recently than you'd believe.
#21
Every language around will, one day, have someone who is the last remaining speaker . This phenomenon has always fascinated me like crazy. Take the man below in the photograpg, he is an Australian Aboriginal gentleman named Big Bill Neidjie. When Big Bill died in 2002, he was the last living speaker of the Gaagudju language of his clan. There was no one in the entire world left he could speak to in his mother tongue. No one who he could discuss the past with, the “good old days”… it’s just such a crazy thought, to me. It won’t happen to English anytime soon. But it’ll happen to a great many other languages in the world. My former father-in-law belonged to a tribe that had its own language. Of that language, only 4000 native speakers remain at last count. There will be a day a language that has just a few hundred or thousand speaker left, will die out. It may take fifty years, a century, but it’ll come to an end. It’s a lonely existence, being the last of something. Much like how the oldest person in the world will know, beyond doubt, that not a single person who was around at his or her birth is still alive. Haunting .
Peeka_Mimi 1 month ago
The dialect of the Spanish my family spoke is dying. For example we say "hi'to" not hijito. I have a whole book trying to preserve the dialect of northern NM and southern CO spoken by Los Hispaños del Valle. It's ancient because in the mid 16th century our people moved North with the Spanish explorers and being isolated due to the mountains, that dialect stuck. However as people started spreading out it is dying.
#22
That mad cow disease is completely incurable well before you start showing symptoms. The problem with this disease is that it’s not caused by a pathogen, it’s caused by a misfolded protein called a prion, which then passes on its disfigurement to other proteins. At first, it’s not noticeable, but months or even years later, you’ll suddenly start experiencing seizure- and dementia-like symptoms, at which point, the prions have begun to create holes in the brain tissue. From there, it’s a slow, painful death. The worst part is, it is very hard to destroy prions. They can remain in the soil for years if not decades after the animal they infected has thoroughly decomposed, meaning they can be absorbed into grass via the soil and consumed by herbivorous animals, repeating the cycle all over again. Only extreme heat has had any luck destroying them, and even then, they appear to be somewhat resistant to the temperatures which would usually destroy all other proteins in the body. It’s like something out of a sci-fi horror film, and yet, it’s 100% real.
Robin Roper 1 month ago
I know someone who developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease; it was awful. The only good thing is that the disease progresses rapidly so the time between diagnosis and death is only about a year.
#23
Plastic pollution is so severe that there are now over 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the world's oceans.
Every piece of plastic that has ever produced is still present in the world. A single plastic bottle can take up to 450 years to decompose in the environment.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive area of floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, is estimated to be twice the size of Texas.
The average person unknowingly ingests about a credit card's worth of plastic each week through food and water.
Lyone Fein 1 month ago
We simply need to stop producing new plastic. All new plastic items should be made from previously existing plastic.This is the kind of legislation we need to start promoting.
#24
Your face has tiny micro organisms. The face mites. They live in hair pores and eat the sebum. At night, they go to the surface and woohoo. Laying eggs in the pore. These are not to be confused with the bacteria that cause acne. They actually help regulate the out put of sebum in your face. Good to know these worms are helping out. But now I'm aware of the multiple microscopic "parties".
Peter Parker 1 month ago
These "parties" are fabulous orgies right on your face! Every night, right on your face. And you complain you never get any action..
#25
Jeffrey Dahmer drilled a hole into some victims' skulls and tried pouring different toxic liquids into the hole. He was trying to make a s*x s***e that could eat and drink but could in no way fight back or escape. The worst fact is that victims might survive the first hole with all brain function intact and live long enough to be fully aware they were going to get a second or third hole drilled.
#26
After a human is “dead” they can still technically hear you, but not understand you. The brain doesn’t fully shut off until a few minutes after death. Makes me sad knowing I wasn’t there to talk to my grandfather right when he died.
#27
Apparently, Japan bombed China with fleas infected with bubonic plague during World War 2.
Big rain I think.
sofacushionfort 1 month ago
At the same time, all Allied POW airmen were subject to prosecution for war crimes by the Japanese
#28
Before Humans were sent to space,they would send animals,dogs,turtles,monkes,etc. The problem with that is that they never bothered in think how they would get back. So a lot of animals just died up there, alone.
#29
There is a chance you might fall in a sleep paralysis-like state when under anesthesia. Meaning you'll feel your surgery while being unable to move. I feel bad for Diavolo now.
#30
“Walking corpse syndrome” is a condition in which the patient believes they are dead, dying, missing parts of their bodies, or do not exist at all.
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