This video was made using insights from vidIQ. Stick around after the video to find out how
we used vidIQ as our secret YouTube weapon while making it! What is the summit of suffering, the apogee
of agony, the peak of excruciating, harrowing, torturous pain? Today we’re going to 11 on the pain scale. We might even hit 12. Hold on to your hats, and just hope none of
these things ever happen to you. 10. Today you’ll hear about familiar pains that
affect many humans, but we will also throw in a few outliers, pains you’ll probably
avoid in your life. So, to kick off this list of horrors, we give
you the curse of the Platypus. Yep, we are talking about that duck-billed
chap that’s so cute if you ever saw one in its resident country of Australia, you’d
probably pick it up and take a selfie with it. These ridiculous beasts might look like a
bunch of animal spare parts stuck together, but by God, do they pack a punch if you tick
them off. In short, their bodies contain venom, really
horrible, scary venom. It contains 19 peptides, which are short chains
of amino acids. That probably means nothing to you, but it
would if you were the victim of a platypus attack. You’d survive, but you’d never forget
the experience as long as you lived. You certainly wouldn’t forget it for weeks
or months after because once you’ve been stung by one of these things, you might have
a sensitivity to pain, a condition known as hyperalgesia. And just after you were envenomated, there’s
a chance you’d be in so much pain that you wouldn’t just roll around screaming, but
you’d pass out. They get you with little sharp spurs on their
feet, usually, a tool for males to scrap with other males during mating season, but humans
are also fair game if you catch a platypus in a bad mood. You might see one in the water and think it’s
a good idea to try and play around with it, and it might then take a swipe at you. Within a few minutes, you wouldn’t only
be in excruciating pain, but you might be paralyzed. That would only be temporary, but the problem
is, once you’d been dragged out of the water and received some attention, not even the
strongest medications could help lessen the pain – which in one report was said to be
“immediate, sustained, and devastating.” A Vietnam war veteran once said his platypus
sting hurt more than when he got struck by shrapnel. Not only that, but you’d probably have to
pull the spur out of your skin, and word on the street is victims can’t do that since
they are hurting so much. Few people have experienced this, but some
have. One report published in the National Library
of Medicine said: “The patient spent six days in hospital,
and the envenomated area remained painful, swollen, and with little movement for three
weeks. Significant functional impairment of the hand
persisted for three months.” We guess the message here is that, in nature,
you should never judge a book by its cover. Pain caused by animals doesn’t really get
any worse than this. Thank God it doesn’t happen often, but this
next pain happens to many of us in life…minus the exploding part. 9. A piece of advice we’re going to give you
is when you know there’s something wrong with one of your teeth, get it seen to. Toothache generally means something is wrong
and won’t get any better without medical attention. You have loads of nerves in your teeth. You might have a cavity, which might cause
a little bit of discomfort, but the pulp down in the root of your tooth might then get infected. Trust us, when this is bad, it’s an 11 on
the pain scale. You’ll want to rip your tooth out by yourself. There are actually plenty of reports of people
doing that when they couldn’t get medical attention. Unlike the rest of your body, there isn’t
much you can do to lessen the pain. You cannot get in there since your tooth is
a closed structure. The infection might then develop into a dental
abscess, and you’ll wish you were toothless. Perhaps one of the worst stories we’ve ever
read while researching these shows is the case of exploding teeth. We’re not kidding. In the 19th century, a dentist in Pennsylvania
named WH Atkinson wrote about severe toothaches. Talking about one particular case, he said:
“During his agonies, he ran about here and there, in the vain endeavor to obtain some
respite; at one time boring his head on the ground like an enraged animal, at another
poking it under the corner of the fence, and again going to the spring and plunging his
head to the bottom in the cold water.” In those days, teeth caused people hell. Another case explained that one man “was
observed to cry, day by day, for hours together.” He actually died, not from pain, but as a
result of how he handled it. In another story, a clergyman from back then
became delirious with pain. In this case, his tooth exploded! The case file says, “All at once a sharp
crack, like a pistol shot, burst his tooth to fragments, giving him instant relief.” That happened a few times. In another case, it was explained that the
explosion was so loud that a woman’s ears rang for days. The tooth was said to have “bursted with
a concussion” and “well-nigh knocked her over.” The BBC wrote that there’s no easy explanation
for why these explosions happened, but they did, and before that, the people suffered
as much as is humanly possible. Don’t ever think that because you’ve had
a regular toothache, tooth issues are not that bad. Toothaches can go off the scale in terms of
pain. You know that already if you’ve been there. Women who’ve had harrowing childbirth experiences
have said their toothache was much worse than pushing out their bloody bundle of joy. Ok, so we guess this is a good time to talk
about what some urologists have called “male childbirth.”
8. We don’t mean men pushing babies out of
their urethras, but it can feel like that. We are talking about kidney stones, those
little devils that can lay in wait for ages and then, at some point, decide it's time
to exit the body. Imagine that, if it was the size of a human
fist and weighed 2.48 pounds (1.12 kilograms). True story. 11 percent of men will have a kidney stone
in their lives compared to 6 percent of women. In 2022, it was reported that a guy in India
had a whopping 206 stones inside of him. He’d been living in absolute agony for months
on end, and not one pain medication made him feel much better. He was in so much pain that he could hardly
do basic things, such as brush his teeth. What happens with kidney stones is waste products
in the blood crystallize and that can end up becoming stones, or in this guy’s case,
206 stones. It took surgeons just one hour to take them
out of his body. It would be an understatement to say he was
relieved. A guy in the US was asked to describe what
his kidney stones felt like, and he said, “Indistinguishable from being stabbed with
a white-hot-glowing knife that's twisted into your insides non-stop for hours.” Another person on a forum explained, “When
you are in that kind of pain, you will try anything; feels like a knife stuck into you
shaped like a star with multiple sharp edges cutting deeper with each breath.” The problem is, people don’t often know
what’s going on until it’s too late. Still, kidney stones can be managed. Just like with toothache, as soon as you feel
any kind of pain, go see a professional. Kidney stones aren’t always excruciating,
but they can be, especially, as the NHS says, when they are as big as a “golf ball.” Now for something a bit out of the ordinary
again. 7. If you were going to invent a name for a creature
and make it sound like a gangster, you’d probably come up with something like “tarantula
hawk wasp.” Wasps get a lot of bad press, but let’s
face it, they don’t exactly ingratiate themselves with humans. At least honeybees fall on their sword after
they plunge their stinger into you, and they make delicious honey. Wasps are more like natural-born killers,
but the tarantula hawk wasp is on another level. You can find them in the US, so you should
know more about them. One person writing about their sting made
us laugh when he said the pain was “unacceptable.” A biologist explained that if you do get stung,
just lie down and start screaming. He wasn’t joking. He said it hurts so much that people can get
injured running around like their backsides are on fire. There are reports of people in so much pain
that they were unable to speak for a few minutes. That’s the good thing about this creature. If you get stung, the intense pain will usually
only last for about five minutes. In some ways, then, you could call the pain
the worst of them all because let’s face it, no one could handle it for hours on end,
like childbirth or toothache or kidney stones. We’re not sure why, but a scientist once
tried to discover what it would be like to be stung by a handful of these critters simultaneously. A paper explained, “Undeterred after the
first sting, he continued, receiving several more stings, until the pain was so great he
lost all of them and crawled into a ditch and just bawled his eyes out.” That doesn’t sound very scientific, but
it was indeed published in 2004 in a paper titled “Venom and the Good Life in Tarantula
Hawks.” The abstract reads, “Although the instantaneous
pain of a tarantula hawk sting is the greatest recorded for any stinging insect, the venom
itself lacks meaningful vertebrate toxicity.” That means it won’t kill you. This wasp is a nightmare on wheels regarding
how it gets its name. It looks for a tarantula, which, let’s face
it, isn’t exactly a pushover in the wild. The wasp stings the spider, paralyzes it,
and drags it into its lair. It then lays an egg that turns into larva,
which over a few weeks, devours the paralyzed spider. If that’s not gangster, we don’t know
what is. They don’t really have any natural predators. As one person wrote, no animal is “dumb
enough” to go after a tarantula hawk wasp. The good news is that they are solitary creatures
and very rarely bother humans, which makes a change from those normal, everyday bastard
wasps that make their nests above your garage door. Still, if you do manage to annoy one, be prepared
for five minutes of “instantaneous, electrifying, and totally debilitating” pain. Ok, let’s get back to things that might
happen to many of you on any given week. 6. Cancer. It’s never a cheery subject to talk about. It fills us with dread. But it will happen to a lot of us. After heart disease, it’s the biggest killer
in the US, taking out more than 20 percent of people in that country who die each year. Cancer is a formidable killer worldwide, so
it’s best you know what’s coming. The good and bad news about cancer is often
you don’t know you have it until it’s too late. Some cancers can be quite silent, so unless
a tumor pushes itself against an organ, it can grow until its heart is content in relative
silence. Cancer is like social media. You don’t know it’s killing you until
you are way past being able to survive it. Not all cancers are the same, though. They come in many shapes and sizes and cause
varying levels of pain. But the one people seem to hate the most in
terms of physical agony is bone cancer. Thankfully, it’s not that common compared
to breast, prostate, skin, colon, and lung cancer. But if you do get it, you might find you have
intermittent bursts of serious pain that happen a few times in the day, every day. Sure, the pain isn’t as bad as having a
platypus stick his mean spurs into your face, but that constant, unrelenting throbbing can
drive you half crazy. A paper in the National Institutes of Health
describes it as “an intermittent episode of extreme pain” that can last seconds or
minutes and can hit a person many times in one day. That sounds like the old-school torture technique
of putting a bag over a person’s head as they are sitting tied to a chair, and everyone
so often, just as the person is feeling comfortable, coming up to them and smacking them in the
chops. Physicians often say that bone cancer is really,
really hard to deal with as sometimes they just can’t seem to take the pain away for
their patients. But again, not all bone cancers are really
painful. We looked at cancer forums, and it seems everyone
is different regarding how they feel. One person said his bone cancer “went from
occasional and more of a dull ache, to constant and sometimes almost unbearable, though it
will reduce back down to a dull ache, but now it is always there.” Another person said:
“I was just walking fine, and all of a sudden, at the snap of your fingers, I suddenly have
massive pain about the size of a dime in my left lower leg. I could hardly make it back home. This continued off and on for weeks.” So, that coming and going, not knowing when
you will get hit, must be awful, especially if you’re one of the people that gets the
super intense version of the pain. We take out hats off to cancer sufferers. You are tough cookies if you can get through
that. This next one sounds like something Satan
invented. 5. If tarantula hawk wasp is a scary name for
an animal, we think “spinal headache” is a scary name for a condition. Imagine telling your buddy on the phone, “Hey,
I’m gonna skip that Nuclear Assault concert tonight. I’ve got a spinal headache.” Joking aside, people have said that when you
have one of these very special headaches, it feels as though something is trying to
split your head apart. Intense pain is often accompanied by what
one medical website called “visual disturbances or feelings of nausea.” They can last for hours, and the pain can
move from inside the head to the face. That sounds like any old headache, though,
and you all have them from time to time. Again, we are the bearer of good news because
spinal headaches usually only happen after someone has had a spinal tap or spinal anesthesia. That’s why some women who’ve been pregnant
get them. They happen because spinal fluid leaks through
a puncture hole in the membrane around the spinal cord. When it happens, you might not only start
tripping but also go dizzy, lose your hearing, and possibly have a seizure. Thank God spinal headaches are uncommon, but
if you’ve had one of the procedures we just mentioned, there’s a chance you’ll have
one. If you’re not already sold on how bad these
things are, a paper in The National Library of Medicine said they can last weeks, and
during that time, the person might not even be able to function. Not only that, there’s a good chance of
death or at least what the paper said are “serious complications.” We looked on forums and found some women who’d
had one after having an epidural during childbirth. One woman said her headache was so bad there
is no way on Earth she’d ever get an epidural again. Another woman said, “I toughed it out. It WAS SO MUCH PAIN. I noticed when I would roll my head; I would
hear cracks.” Yet another woman said, “It took about a
week before I was able to stand up without severe pain.” But to all the women out there watching this,
please talk to your doctor about this if you’re going to have a child. These headaches can happen, but there’s
much more chance you’ll have a hazard-free epidural. Making kids is hard work, of course, but guys
have a certain sensitivity, too, when it comes to their baby-making tackle. 4. We imagine most men watching this have been
hit in the balls at one time or another. It’s common. Really common. Soccer balls. Baseballs. Tennis balls. Stray feet from angry kids. Sticks and stones can break your bones, but
they can do much more damage to your mighty eggs. It hurts so much because so many nerves are
packed into such a small area. After all, you have to protect those things
with your life. In purely evolutionary terms, you’re only
here to procreate, so losing your balls makes you about as useful as a spoon in a gunfight. So, what you really don’t want is them getting
squashed, stabbed, shot, or bitten off by an angry dog. Now you’re thinking, well, that aint ever
gonna happen. You might be right, but there’s something
else you need to think about, something that is actually not that uncommon. It’s called Testicular Torsion; possibly
the two worst words put together on our planet. Basically, the balls twist around, which can
cause extreme pain. The pain is almost always severe. It happens mostly to young guys under 18 years
of age, and although it can be the result of some kind of trauma, most of the time,
it just happens by itself. It’s so painful that the poor kid might
be unable to eat or sleep and, in some cases, he might be in so much pain, he can barely
communicate. That’s the worst-case scenario. Sometimes the pain is moderate, with one guy
writing on a forum, “I had the real deal, the symptoms are basically swelling of the
scrotum with the penis shrinking a lot, a prolonged pain very similar to that experienced
after a kick to the balls only more acute and constant.” It needs to be sorted out fast as it can cause
necrosis, which means tissue death. Right, we think it’s time we talked about
violence. 3. We’ll start this one with a question. Which movie is this line out of, “Aside
from the kneecap, the gut is the most painful area a guy can get shot in”… … … … …
Did you get it? The answer is Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir
Dogs. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know that the
guy who got shot in the stomach was in incredible pain. The actor, Tim Roth, made that injury look
like the worst thing known to man, perhaps a lot worse than testicular torsion or bone
cancer. But if Tarantino is right, a shot to the abdomen
doesn’t hurt as much as a shot to the kneecap. Just imagine if someone bashed your knee with
a hammer and smashed all the bones and ligaments. Trauma like that to the knee is very, very
painful, one of the worst things that could ever happen to you. You’d beg for a platypus sting over that. If you know much about the so-called “troubles”
in Ireland, you’ll know that certain groups had what was called “punishment attacks.” In 2017, the BBC talked about such attacks
in Northern Ireland’s Protestant Loyalist areas and the Catholic Republican communities. The attack of choice was being shot through
the knee. The reason for some of the attacks was young
folks selling drugs. One lad explained that it happened to him
after he fell in with the wrong crowd. He said, “The first time they shot me, I
only moved a bit, but the second time they shot me, I was screaming. It went right through and hit my main artery. It busted my whole knee bone.” Another guy explained, “I was shot in the
shin, thigh, ankle, and calf. I was in shock but shouted to my girlfriend,
'Call an ambulance'. Then I passed out.” It’s supposed to cause the most amount of
pain without killing you, and from what we can see, if you don’t pass out, you will
scream like a banshee. If you don’t lose the limb, you’ll almost
certainly have a limp for the rest of your life. This kind of paramilitary policing in the
streets is frowned upon by most people in Ireland, and thank Jesus, it doesn’t happen
much these days. These next two pains on the list do. 2. Just about everything we’ve already talked
about today is so bad it will make you wish you were unconscious. It’s a sad fact that pain has literally
driven people to the edge of despair and sometimes over the edge. The internet is full of folks who say their
pain was literally not figuratively unbearable. The situation is always worse when pain medications
don’t touch the pain and when the pain is chronic. Sure, a wasp can make you howl, a toothache
can make you cry, and a shattered kneecap can make you wish you were dead, but at least
in the back of your mind, you know the pain will end. This brings us to cluster headaches, the most
awful thing – or second most awful thing – nature ever passed onto us. Maybe God had read the Marquis de Sade. Because cluster headaches really feel like
the invention of a sadist. They are described as excruciating attacks,
usually on one side of the head and around the eye, that can come on at any time with
no warning at all. They can bring you down to your knees, make
you bite onto wood, scream, cry, and crawl around like a dog on broken legs. It’s like being stabbed through the head
with a hot knife. People have been known to bash their heads
hard against walls, knocking themselves down just to do something. They can be like that anywhere from 15 minutes
to 3 hours, and the bouts might happen up to eight times a day. This usually goes on for 4 to 12 weeks, and
then they usually stop. They might stop for months or years and then
start over again. Welcome to hell. It doesn’t get worse than this, which is
why some sufferers have googled the words “euthanasia clinic” in their darkest hours. We don’t even know what causes them, although
some scientists have said they seem to cause activity in a part of the brain called the
hypothalamus. It seems smokers get them more, but they might
also be related to certain smells, and they could be passed on through genes. Regular meds will do nothing, although specialist
treatments may help. In the US, some scientists say psychedelics
are one of the most promising treatments. They say magic mushrooms might not just fix
severe depression, but they might stop headaches from hell. One recent paper said the magical type of
mushroom for treating such horrible headaches “were comparable to or more efficacious
than most conventional medications.” The Washington Post in 2021 talked about a
guy who’d tried everything on Earth over 40 years to make his cluster headaches stop,
and what finally worked was good old psilocybin – the stuff in mushrooms that open what
someone once called the doors of perception. These people are willing to try anything. One said he’d eat boot polish if he thought
it would help. Another said, “The pain is so intense that
I’ve had some seemingly psychotic thoughts during attacks. Like maybe if I could take pliers and start
pulling out molars, or if I hammered in the smallest drill bit near my eye, that could
relieve the pressure.” Do we need to say any more? Most of the 300,000 people in the US that
have these headaches suffer in silence. They don’t get help. They aren’t part of specialist medical trials. In some cases, even their friends don’t
believe them. It really is hell for them. You’re probably now thinking, how do we
top that? What on earth could be worse than a cluster
headache? 1. Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come
to talk with you again. These are the words people might hear when
they have another bout of trigeminal neuralgia. These are similar in some ways to cluster
headaches, but they certainly aren’t the same. Still, they might feel like a knife going
through your head, which might happen 100 times a day. No kidding. You can’t live a normal life when you have
them; the attacks might go on for months at a time. They’re caused when something called the
trigeminal nerve is compressed by a blood vessel, and while there are drugs that can
help, the attacks may come back. We’re not allowed to give you the nickname
of this disease since YouTube doesn’t like the word, so let’s just say that people
who have these attacks literally cannot put up with them. In this case, unbearable means unbearable. As one man explained:
“It’s a hundred times worse than the worst pain you’ve ever felt but pulsating and
persistent like someone is trying to pull your eye out.” Ever wondered how we decide what to make videos
about? We’re going to let you in on a little secret. It’s vidIQ. It lets us see exactly how many searches per
month a certain keyword gets. More searches, means more potential viewers,
But of course there’s more to it than that. VidIQ also shows you the competition for that
keyword. The less competition there is, then the more
likely it is that your video will stand out. Which means more views for your video! I know, it sounds too easy, but it really
is! You don’t need to have a genius IQ, you
just need to have vidIQ! But try it for yourself! Get a 30 day trial for only $1 by going to
vidiq.com/theinfoshow Now you need to watch “Radiation - Worst
Ways to Die.” Or, have a look at “Why It Would Suck To
Live Through The End Of The Universe.”
