Doctors have found hundreds of gold needles nested in a 65-year-old South Korean woman’s knees. The woman suffers from osteoarthritis, so she visited an acupuncturist to relieve her pain. The acupuncturist thought it was a great idea to insert all these needles in her knees and leave them there, because that’s always a great idea, right?
Actually, it’s a stupid idea, according to Dr. Ali Guermazi professor of radiology at Boston University. He told Live Science, this will only cause problems:
The human body wants to get rid of the foreign object. It starts with some mechanism of defense, for example inflammation and forming [fibrous tissue] around the object.
And on top of that:
The patient can’t go into an MRI because needles left in the body may move, and damage an artery [and] the needles may obscure some of the anatomy.
Next time she should just use magnets or unicorn dust or some other traditional thing like that.
