This week, the nerds at Harvard University‘s Annals Of Improbable Research magazine handed out the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, coveted awards that honour “imaginative” – a polite way of saying “totally goddamn bizarre” – achievements in the field of science.
This year’s big breakthroughs included the discovery that banana peels aren’t actually as slippery as you think, and that cat ownership is bad for your mental health, but the awards also brought attention to one discovery that will rock medical science to its very foundations:
Shoving bacon into your nostrils is an entirely valid method of dealing with nosebleeds.
Those of you who’ve been packing pork products into your nasal cavities all this time, to the condemnation of your peers and the cruel laughter of your loved ones, take a bow. You’ve been doing the right thing all along.
The Times Of India report that this particular breakthrough came from doctors at the Detroit Medical Centre, who used the bacon treatment as a “last resort” for a patient with an uncontrollable nosebleed, and found it to be wildly effective.
The patient was a child suffering from a rare condition called Glanzmann Thrombasthenia, which keeps blood from clotting. When doctors inserted strips of delicious cured pork into the child’s nostrils, they discovered, much to their surprise, that the hemorrhaging stopped.
“We had to do some out-of-the-box thinking,” said Dr. Sonal Saraiya, of her House-like discovery. “So that’s where we put our heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do.”
Explaining the logic behind the treatment, Saraiya said that “clotting factors in the pork” coupled with the fact that “the high level of salt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose” are what make it effective.
So there you have it. Bacon: delicious and potentially life-saving. That’ll do, pigs. That’ll do.
Photo: Joe Klamar via Getty Images
