April 21, 2016 • 44 mins
Imagine a disease that warps and petrifies the flesh, transforming normal skin into bark-like growths that slowly consume the hands and feet. Commonly known as "tree man disease," Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis (EV) is one of the rarest medical conditions in the world, yet the extreme, deformative nature of the disease continues to intrigue media consumers around the world. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the science of EV, it's links to Human Papillomavirus and why we can't look away.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetop dot com.
Hey you welcome to stop to blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Brown and I'm Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
have you ever had like a warped or any kind
of I don't know, just weird growth. Um. Yeah, I've
(00:26):
had things of that nature. I had sort of like
an ingrown hair once that went to the dermatolgist about
and they're like sliced it out, and yeah, that's like,
I think, pretty common for most people. In fact, like
just recently, you know, I'm closing in on forty and
and just recently I went to the doctor and I
had like this weird growth and like I'm not gonna
(00:47):
detail where it was, but it was, you know, the
lower quadrant kind of uncomfortable and uh, did you have
eyes or amount? No eyes yet? It wasn't there yet,
but I was worried about eyes. And I said to
my doctor, what is this do I need to worry?
Is a cancer? And he was like, oh, that's a
skin tag. Those are super common, don't worry about it.
(01:08):
And then he like whipped out liquid nitrogen and right
there just froze it off. My body and burned it off,
and uh, you know, I can imagine just having that
one little thing. I was like super freaked out of course,
Like the thought is just, oh, it's cancer, right. Uh.
But today we're gonna talk about a disease in which,
(01:28):
like we're not just talking about like warts or skin
tags here, but like people's entire bodies overgrow with these
bark like lesions to the point that they're referred to
as tree men. Yeah. They're kind of talking about some
of the well certainly rare, but also like worst case
um situations in which you have out of control growth
(01:50):
going on with your body and yet you were continuing
to live with it. Yeah, and so it's just it's
it's actually referred to the medical term, let's take it
slowly here, epidermo dysplasia verisiformists, and but most people call
it tree man disease. Yeah, and we may call it
(02:10):
e V. Yeah this episode, just to keep it simple,
but also maybe not refer to it, uh with this
more fantastic connotations. And those of you out there, you
have maybe seen pictures of guys like this before. It's
not just men. Actually I shouldn't say guys. There have
been women who have had the disease as well, but
it's incredibly rare, like super rare. So we're like, we
couldn't find any statistics on how rare it actually is.
(02:32):
There's only like three pretty well documented cases and those
are in the last like let's say, like twenty or
thirty years. Uh. And but what's particularly interesting about this
to me and I want to keep in mind as
like we're going forward and talking about this disease, which
is fascinating and the medical science curiosity that I think
is worthy of the show, but also that like there's
(02:53):
a what I call kind of elephant man syndrome thing
going on here with these with patients of tree man disease. Yeah,
where you get a little media outlets just swarm on
these people. Um and in particular, they will take a
lot of pictures of them, uh, follow them around. In
one case, there was a guy who I think he
(03:14):
was He was followed by at least two different TV
stations that were multiple documentaries made about him. One of
the TV channels UH paid for his medical surgeries because
there and we'll talk about it. There's treatment available for
people with tree Man disease or e V. But Um,
there's also just a weird kind of Yes, this is
(03:36):
a medical curiosity, but also like a sideshow barker kind
of gaze to it. Yeah, it is. It is a
weird area to get into because you know, we were
as as a population, we're kind of drawn to these
these examples. We we can't look away. There's a there
is a definite grotesque quality to these to these conditions,
(04:01):
and you know that, like I said that there they
can be nightmareck to behold, and so we're interested in them.
And then also we you know, everyone loves a story
of somebody overcoming a situation. Everybody loves a story in
which medical science is able to triumph over you know,
disfiguration and disease. And so yeah, we want we want
(04:22):
to document these stories. We want to see the stories.
We want to see that before and after that, you know,
the marvelous transformation. But on the other hand, yeah, there's
this exploitive aspect of it as well. I've been watching
that TV show Penny Dreadful lately. You know what that is.
It's like I watched the first season. Okay, yeah, so
there's like, you know, no spoilers here, but but it's
set in the late nineteenth century, and there's freak shows
(04:46):
are sort of a thing that are you know, are
talked about and and sort of alluded to in the show,
especially because some of the you know, some of the
characters are werewolves and Frankenstein and and vampires and stuff
like that. So there's there's that kind of alluding Asian
going on. And they even referenced John Merrick at one point. Uh.
But in It's so I guess maybe I'm hyper sensitive
(05:08):
to it because I'm watching that show. And then I
was doing the research on this, and I was just like, well, yeah,
a hundred hundred and fifty years ago, the only way
that these these guys with e V would have gotten
by is by being in some kind of quote unquote
freak show, you know. Uh. And then and even then,
there wouldn't have been any treatment for them. They probably
would have succumbed to the cause, or rather the symptoms
(05:31):
of the disease. Yeah, it's one of those situations where
that the disease does in fact seems so rare that
when when you look back through different myth cycles trying
to find examples of where it might have occurred, and
certainly it's possible cases of of e V occurred and
we're just misdiagnosed and something like leprosy or some other
duh deformity. But you don't, I mean, you see some
(05:54):
examples of people turning into trees, uh and then turning
into it two would in myth cycle and you know,
and in literature, I mean certainly that the example that
comes to my mind is the the wood of suicides
in Dante's Inferno, and uh, and there are a few
other cases as well, like there's um, you know, you
can look to the case that the art of Hieronymous Bosh.
(06:17):
You can see speaking trees in various myths. In some
strains of Authorian legend, Merlin is turned into a tree,
or he's imprisoned within a tree tree by the Lady
of the lake. It's but but for the most part,
you I mean, you have these other examples of petrification
occurring in myths, but not so much like people becoming
living trees. Which makes me wonder if like like that
(06:37):
just underlines how rare it is that they didn't even
really affect our our folklore and if it's a modern
condition too, because as we'll discuss, uh, you know, the
things that we that make it worse are somewhat industrial
in nature, but uh, I don't know. I think of
like D and D monsters, like dryads and things like
(06:59):
that at or like Tolkien obviously Tolkien's ends, right, but
those aren't even more than a hundred years old. I mean,
dryads obviously exist within within myth and fairy tales and
things like that, but uh, yeah, I don't know. There
doesn't seem to be a lot of precedent for this,
um And so that's one of the things that's really
fascinating about this condition is whether or not it's brand
(07:23):
new or if it's something that's just been hidden away
carefully throughout throughout history. But yeah, it's it's unpleasant. Um.
I guess let's get into like the details of just
like what it is exactly, so we're not just kind
of talking about, you know, the broad strokes of people
who have barked growing off their bodies. So it's a
(07:43):
condition in which your body becomes extremely suscepti susceptible to
the human papaloma virus otherwise known as HPV. And what
happens is you, you know, you take on that that
virus it causes branch or bark like skin growths to
develop across your entire body. And in most cases this
(08:05):
is on the hands and feet. Uh. And they're basically
malignant skin tumors. Uh. And when I'm saying, I mean,
if you're listening to this and you're trying to picture
it and you haven't seen it before we've posted about
it on social I'm sure that the thumbnail for this
episode will have some kind of image that will give
you an idea of what it looks like. There's there's
photos of two of the guys we're gonna talk about today.
(08:27):
But it's it goes beyond just like your skin turning
to bark. It's it literally looks like roots are growing
out of your hands and feet and just huge growths
to the point where, uh, these people can't function, they
can't have jobs, they must be in pain, I would assume, Yeah,
I mean it's it's out of control growth. It looks
(08:48):
like it looks like some sort of a molding accident
with like a plastic figuring that sort of thing, you know, Yeah, yeah, um.
And what's also really interesting is some of the research basically,
you know, they had come to a point where they
were like, well, this is a thing that usually happens
to people who are forty or older, but now most
(09:09):
of the examples we're seeing are actually happening to people
in the early years of life, which they think is
because of a combination of uh, industrialized sort of ecosystems
that we live in and working outdoors, and we'll get
to that, but basically sunlight makes it worse, and also
renal transplant recipients and immunosuppressed patients have an increased risk
(09:33):
of developing these allegians that we're talking about here. Yeah,
and it's worth mentioning. So the immunosuppression here too. Obviously,
you know, it made me think of this and then
it does pop up in the literature. But it's a
lot like HIV in the in the sense that the
a lot of the literature compares the lesion growths to
the same kind of lesions that some patients who have
(09:53):
HIV get um, but they don't grow as out of
control in HIV these case. Um. So, okay, we all
hear HPV get thrown around a lot. There's a lot
of like anti STD commercials on TV or at least
at least at least the TV I'm watching. I get
talked to about HPV all the time, but it's worth
(10:13):
probably revisiting, I think. Right. So, human papilloma virus this
is the kind of thing. It's a sexually transmitted infection.
UH in the US. It belongs well, not just in
the US, UH, it belongs to a family of more
than a hundred and different strains of virus that can
cause warts on your toes and your fingers, are all
(10:34):
throughout your body. UM. Thirty in particular, of these hundred
different strains are spread as an STD. Those infections are
generally in the genital area, you know, for obvious reasons.
And you actually mentioned too that we've we've known about
hand plant are external and ano genital warts since antiquity,
but it's only in the last hundred thirty years we've
(10:55):
recognized laryn g awards and tream and disease as we're
discussing here, and only since the sixties and seventies that
we've made that connection to HPV. Yeah, And what's kind
of interesting here is is there's a lot of academic
research into this and it seems like they've pretty much
got it nailed down in terms of like what causes it,
why we why we get it, but that it's so
(11:19):
h incredibly rare that there aren't a lot of case
studies to operate with. Uh so, but with HPV, not
with e V. There's no cure, but there's preventative vaccines
and physicians can remove the infected tissue right probably the
same way like I described with the good old liquid
nitrogen being broken out. I had a wart on my
(11:40):
finger for the longest time, and they did the same
thing with that. They broke out the liquid nitrogen and
then they took like a scalpel and dug out some
of the stuff out of there. Afterwards, Um, yeah, my
thing I had removed is like was right in the
middle of my chest and like you can't even tell
that it was there now, but it was. It was
weird because that the like after I had it there
was I had to to like not swim or do
(12:02):
any kind of like yeah opening exercises, and every time
I would even imagine it, I would imagine just like
opening up my trip open, all my skin falling up. Yeah. Yeah,
it's weird, especially like it's one of those things where
it feels like your body is turning against you. And
I'm just talking about these kind of like first world
little growths that that you know, I've experienced where it's
(12:23):
like I can't imagine just like your entire body just
growing out of control like this. Well, as you get older,
it's like your body changes his priorities where you know,
you're you're you're asking the body. You're saying, hey, body,
how about healing up this little you know, elbow injury
I sustained. Can we get some forces working on that?
And the bodies like, sorry, I gotta grow this nose
(12:44):
hair And you're like, how does that make over? Here?
This is more important? Well, you know, if if you
don't know a lot about HPV, and I'll be honest,
I didn't know a ton about it, but it's it's
actually a pretty common thing. Twenty million America have it.
That's why we see these commercials and such as a
lot of like health warnings about it of sexually active
(13:06):
people will get it at some point in their lives.
Six point two million Americans. That's way more than listen
to our show. But we'll like, we'd like to get
every person who has HPV to listen to the show. Uh,
they will get a new infection every year. And here's
the thing, most people who get it don't even know
it because they don't necessarily display the symptoms. They don't
(13:27):
all get these growths, right Uh. And in rare cases,
pregnant women who have HPV can pass it on to
their babies during birth. What often happens in that rare case, uh,
is the infants will get the growths in their throat
or on their voice box. Um. So that sounds unpleasant,
(13:47):
but but that's something that's fairly treatable. Like I said,
there's a vaccine. U e V or tree man disease
is basically like this gune totally haywire, just like the
extreme exam bowl. And again, we can't emphasize enough how
rare this is. So rare that it's only in our
modern Uh. It's only with our modern population and the
(14:09):
greatest population of humans ever and with our with our
media integration. Uh that we've been that that that it's
something that the average person might be aware of. Yeah, absolutely, uh. One.
Just like last comparison with HPV, so in HPV, the
growths are described as appearing as like soft cauliflower shaped lumps.
(14:29):
And there's been a strong connection found between HPV, HPV
and cervical cancer and women. So it is a major
health concern. Uh, and we know that smoking and recreational
drug use can make it worse because they suppress the
immune system. So there you go that that kind of
ties together with e V. Right, and that uh there's
that suppressed immune system causing the growth to be a little,
(14:52):
a little out of control. But also I wouldn't describe
the growths with e V as soft cauliflower from what
I've seen. Uh, there they look like bark, really looks
like And there's a lot of scientific terms that will
get into for like how how the different kinds of
growths are defined, but uh, yeah, it's it's something entirely
(15:13):
foreign to my experience. Okay. So one article that we
turned to in particular that was just sort of like
a a general overview of this disease is epidermisplasia varius,
aformist colon and early and unusual presentation by Emson and Caballer,
(15:34):
And they outline basically like a history of what we
know about this disease and sort of where where we've
gotten to with it. It was first described in ninety
two by scientists lou Lewin Dowski and Lutts, so sometimes
it's called Lewandowski and Lutts. Uh like dysplasia, I think,
um so if you're having like, if you're looking for
(15:55):
information about it, I found like obviously tree man disease
pops up a lot of which is so does epidermis,
p blajia, verisa formist. But there's also different stuff that's
titled under the Lewandowski and Lutz heading as well. In
ninety nine, that's when we found out there there was
a relationship between it and high risk skin cancer, so
(16:16):
they kind of put the two together U E. V.
The way that it works is that there are mutations
on two of our genes in the people who get it,
ever one and ever two genes, and this is in
particular on chromosome chromosome seventeen Q two five. Now, there
(16:38):
was a lot of academic literature on the genetics behind this,
but it went way over my head and I felt
like it wouldn't be particularly useful to us or to
the audience. But just know there's a lot out there
if you're if you know your genetics and you want
to learn more about this, there's plenty to be found. Um,
what basically from what I could gather is that it
causes a defect of cell mediated community and this leads
(17:01):
the patients to be abnormally susceptible to the HPV uh.
And in some studies they said that it's specifically HPV
five and eight and then sometimes HPV fourteen, seventeen, twenty
and forty seven. Those are the ones that tend to
cause the bark growths. And these mutations have also been found.
There's a lot of research on this, but it was
(17:23):
also pretty impenetrable to me with my background. Uh. It's
found to inhibit and bote and complicate zinc distribution in
the human body, so that may also have something to
do with these weird growths as well. So the bark
here is described as an eruption of macules and papules
that are war like. So I guess this is where
like the soft color flower, it may look hard in
(17:45):
the pictures, but it's probably you know, war like in texture. Yeah.
And again, like in the in the research, there was
a lot of uh, just really in depth description of
the types of growths using words that I had no
idea what it or. Uh. So they'll they'll actually also
be other cutaneous lesions that form as well, and maybe
(18:05):
some of these are a bit harder. Uh, and these
are similar to what are found on AIDS patients as
as we've already mentioned scaly patches, etcetera. Now, these malignancies
don't usually manifest until at least forty years of age,
but because of more outdoor occupation and sun exposure. And
this is key because we may come back to this
with some related conditions. It's now beginning to showing younger people.
(18:27):
So because sun exposure can hasten the transformation, especially if
the patient is living at a high altitude. Yeah, that
seems to be another factor that they're concerned about. All Right,
we're gonna take a break and we come back. We're
going to discuss uh what we know about the treatment
of of e V. And we may also discuss just
a few related conditions that involve hardened skin growths. Okay,
(18:59):
so we're back. There have been many treatments that have
been tried on e V or tree man disease, and
I have to be honest that they have either been
ineffective or had only temporary results. So we've got oral
and topical retinoids that have been used interfere on immunotherapy,
electro desiccation. That sounds brutal. Yeah, this is uh basically
(19:24):
what this consists of. It's essentially like an electro cauterizing tool,
so you're you're you're destroying the tissue directly, uh, and
you're also preventing bleeding from from happening. Okay. That sounds
kind of like what I had with that war, Like
they scraped it off with a blade and then they
applied the liquid nitrogen like directly like open skin to
basically destroy the tissue. Yeah. Yeah, It's apparently a pretty
(19:46):
common dermatology technique. Okay. And the last one listed here
is cryrotherapy, which I imagine is what I had, uh
with using the liquid nitrogen. Okay. Some of the research indicates, however,
that if you apply radiotherapy to this, it may actually
cause the malignant transformations of skin lesions, so it makes
(20:07):
it worse. So that kind of goes in whether we're
talking about earlier with the exposure to the fun Yeah exactly,
And this is what led them to think like, oh,
maybe you know these people who have this genetic mutation
combined with working outdoors. Uh is somehow, you know, causing
these two to overgrow when they normally wouldn't UM. So,
(20:29):
the most effective thing that they have available right now
is surgical treatment, and it's basically doctors going in and
exercising the growths and then grafting other skin flaps over
them as a replacement um. And during surgery, these doctors
have to be really careful because they don't want to
hurt any major nerves or cause any other health issues.
But I mean, like again, like if you've seen the
(20:49):
photos of people who are afflicted with this, it's pretty
hard to tell what you would be carving into, you know.
I mean I imagine, like, let's take the hand just
as an example, like the structure of the skeletal structure
and the uh you know, blood and dermis and all
that that's in your hand would be there. But then
(21:10):
there's just this massive pounds and pounds of bark like
growths over it. So you've got to take it pretty slowly. Yeah,
I mean, in a sense, and this is simplifying, you're
kind of having to to carve the original form out
of the extra tissue. Yeah. So we have two examples
that we're going to touch on today, and these are
relatively recent during the last like ten years UM. And
(21:32):
from what I could find, other than these two guys,
there was like one other person that was a named
case study uh and he was in Romania. And then
a lot of the other research referred to people that
they used as case studies. But I imagine that those
patients wanted their identities to be anonymous, so they didn't
(21:53):
use names, but they would say, like, for instance, like
one of the big case studies looked at a girl
who had worked on a farm at a high altitude,
worked outdoors, been exposed to a lot of sunlight. She
had tree man disease UH, and they were able to
they basically walked through like here's how it developed, here's
how the surgery went with her, YadA, YadA. But they
(22:13):
never named her. The two big ones that we know of,
the first is a guy named Abul Bajendra and he's
in Bangladesh and he uh this is relatively recently, slowly
lost his ability to work as these dozens of two
to three inch roots grew out of his hand uh.
And he was a bicycle puller. That was his job
(22:36):
and he had to stop doing it. I imagine that's
from my experiences in Southeast Asia. I imagine that's like
when you pull like a tuck tuck like carriage or
something like that. Yeah. Um. And then so what happened
was there was a team of surgeons at DOCA Medical
College Hospital that found out about his condition and they
offered to remove his growths, and the hospital itself way
(23:00):
of the costs. But it required multiple operations over time
to remove eleven pounds of growths from his hands and feet.
And there is an interview with his sister and she
said before that just hundreds of people would come and
visit his home over the years just to witness quote
unquote the tree man. Right. So there is a kind
(23:22):
of like mythical sort of I think, like uh, supernatural
quality to it, you know that that people probably are like, oh,
what is this thing? Yeah? I mean people would just
want to know why does this occur? Not only medically
but also teleologically. You know. In fact, when I was
doing some research for this one and trying to find
(23:43):
some some additional studies on it, like I found a
blog where where somebody's devoted entire blog to like disproving Christianity,
and this was one of their examples, they were like
this this exists, therefore there can be no God um,
which you know, I'm not going to get into the
particulars of that argument because I don't think it's quite
(24:05):
as simple as that, but but certainly, like that's the
kind of response people have, Like you see something like this,
and you have how does this fit into my worldview
that this is occurring? Uh? And then you know, how
does it fit into my worldview that this is how
we we treat these people and this is how some
of these people end up getting actual treatment for their condition. Yeah.
Based on a lot of like the stuff we've covered
(24:28):
in the past on the show, especially like thinking about
you know, for instance, the history of witchcraft, I could
very easily see like something like this happening to somebody
in a village, doesn't matter where the village is, uh,
and the people in that society going, oh, they've been cursed. Yeah,
Like if I remember, someone is to blame, Yeah, if
(24:49):
I remember correctly. In Britain, one of the big witch
hunting tropes was that the witch would have a familiar,
which you know means hey, there's a straight cat in
that neighborhood or fields it's act like you virtually little
or nothing that you need to trump up that charge.
But then the additional charges that since it is some
sort of a demonic familiar she has an extra nipple
(25:10):
on her body, defeat it. And of course all you
need for that is just like the smallest skin tag
skin tag or award, and then yeah, that's all you need. Yeah, totally.
So Yeah, so this kind of thing I could see.
And this is this is what's particularly weird to us
about this is any time we've ever covered sort of
a medical curiosity like this, there is like a lineage,
(25:31):
like a trace throughout history of how it's been mythologized
or viewed by people. Tree man disease just doesn't seem
to pop up. Yeah, not specifically anyway. I mean, certainly
they're deformed characters throughout mythology and folklore, but but those
probably seem like different things. Like you know, we talked
(25:51):
about the elephant man at the top. Clearly that was
a very different condition. Yeah. Well, so there's the other
guy that's relatively I guess famous for having this disease.
He was in Indonesia's name was Day Day or d D.
Kaswara Uh and He had thirteen pounds or six kilograms
(26:11):
of these warts surgically removed from his body. He was
operated on at the Hassan Sadecan Hospital in West Java.
Here's the thing, Uh, he went through the surgery surgery
process and uh, even after the surgeries, they just kept returning.
You know, It's it's there right Like he he doesn't
have the genes for the to have an immune system
(26:35):
that will suppress HPV, so it's just continually going. Yeah,
and that's that's heartbreaking to think. I've imagine just going
through this, this tremendous surgery to rid yourself of these
growth and then they come back. Uh. And so this
was a guy that was highlighted in a lot of
Western media. Uh. He even appeared on our our old employers,
the Discovery Channel. I believe they had some kind of
(26:57):
a documentary or maybe a TV series episode about him.
So maybe some of you out there had seen something
like that. In fact, when I posted a picture not
of him, but of the guy from Bangladesh on on
Facebook yesterday, a lot of people said, oh, yeah, yeah,
I saw that on TV. I remember seeing this guy. Yeah,
and again it's it's weird. It puts me in a
(27:18):
weird place to to see that sort of thing, because
on one hand, it's great that, say, a TV production
company is going to pay for someone like this to
get the treatment they need. But on the other hand,
you get into that elephant man area right right to
what extent is this exploitation? Um? Yeah? And in fact,
Discovery paid for some of his medical bills for him
(27:41):
to have these multiple surgeries over and over again. Uh
so yeah, it is. It's a little I don't know,
it feels like there's an ethical quandary there, and I
don't know where I quite come down on it, right, So,
like thinking about it from our perspective, because obviously we
are part of the media. If you're listening to us
out there, you know, you're probably going, hey, Robert and Christian,
you guys are you know, being a little facetious here,
(28:02):
But we we recognize that, right. But it's sort of like, uh,
we wouldn't be able to fully cover and bring to
you the information about this disease if those these two
cases did Cassara and um Apple Gendre, if those weren't
thoroughly covered by the media. And that's where I first
(28:24):
found out about it, and then got the idea, let's
dig further into the academic literature. Otherwise, you know, I
wouldn't have known about it unless like I was a
genetic student or something like that, right, um. And yet
at the same time, it's sort of like, uh, it
feels a little gross the way that they are. I
don't know if exploited is the right word or not,
(28:45):
but but you know, like, so, so I'll give you
an example. And we may or may not use these
pictures for the thumbnails for the episode, but I think, well,
at the very least, we'll have at least have the
pictures of the condition on the landing page for the episode,
so yeah, you know you'll be able to see speaking
see it there. In the case of Mr Bajendra, the photos,
(29:06):
you know, there's something like I don't know in our
stock photo collection, like twenty photos of of him in
various angles, holding up his hands or holding up his
feet or sitting in an awkward position to showcase his disease.
And as I was looking at I was like, well,
this is useful because it gives us a visual representation
of it. But then at the same time, like I
could just see that this guy was uncomfortable, he felt
(29:28):
weird about it. Uh. He didn't quite know what to
do with himself, you know. And you could tell, like
off camera there was somebody who was like, Okay, can't you,
you know, tilt your hand a little bit more this
way or whatever, and he just looks, you know, like
a deer in headlights, like he's scared, you know. Uh,
And so that that feels weird. But getting back to
(29:50):
kaskas Wara, Sorry I'm probably butchering these names. He very
first noticed his condition after he cut his knee when
he was a teen nature, which is interesting to me, Like,
I don't know how that connects, especially given like what
we know about high altitudes and sunlight and such and
and uh, but like maybe the way it healed, like yeah, um,
(30:14):
but it it ultimately led to ruin for him, you know,
as these growths grew out of control, he lost his job,
his wife left him, he was shunned by his family. Uh.
And then you know, the sad part of this is
is that even after getting all of these surgeries, just
recently in the last couple of months, he passed away. Uh.
And as far as I can tell, it was a
result of complications I don't know if it was necessarily
(30:36):
from e V, but he had complications with hepatitis, liver,
and gastric disorders. Uh, and so maybe the the e
V was somehow affecting those, or maybe it was just
another condition he had entirely. Yeah, I think a lot
of a lot of our fascination with it comes down
to the fact that this is kind of an extreme
and just overtly visual example of what so many of
(30:59):
our bodies eventually do. Our bodies eventually developed problems that
mess up our lives and in many cases in our lives. So,
you know, we this is just kind of an outrageous
and arguably monstrous example of of of a of a
reality that we're all going to face. Yeah, it's especially
uh you know, like there's there's that kind of old trope,
(31:22):
especially in horror literature, which you out there know that
Robert and I are fond of, uh, the idea of
decaying beauty, right, Uh, and that especially in Western culture
that like we prize our good luck so much that
when they start to fade, will do anything to keep them. Uh.
The old Dorian Gray myth right, our story, it's not
(31:42):
really myth. Oscar Oscar Wilde wrote a story Penny Dreadful
Again during Crazy Character Yeah, uh and uh yeah, it
makes me think of I just started reading this comic
book that's kind of related. It's called The Beauty, and
the premise of the comic book is that there's a
there's a sexually transmitted disease called the Beauty, and if
(32:02):
you get it, you your body basically becomes beautiful, become
more sexually attractive. Like the side effects the symptoms of
the disease make you skinnier, make your skin look clearer.
Uh and and so you subsequently, subsequently you have people
walking around who all look like supermodels, and it seems
(32:26):
like from what I've read so far, at least in
the first issue, uh, they spontaneously combust after a while.
Oh well, you know, that's about how it goes. That
might be a problems. That's how it goes for beautiful
people in our world. And you just you go out
in a blaze of glory. But yeah, that's where the
fascination with this comes from. I think, right like, people
see this and they go, oh my god, that's my
worst nightmare. Because like I had a mole that I
(32:49):
had to have removed, whereas like you know this, these
these poorer guys can barely move their hands, they can't
operate tools, they can't do their jobs or wives leave
them all that stuff. It's rough, all right. So at
this point you're probably wondering, well, okay, this is this
is one extremely rare condition, But aren't there other conditions
that can petrify uh flesh that indeed may have informed
(33:12):
some of these myth cycles that we've alluded to. Well, yes,
there are, there are several conditions. We're gonna just run
through four known conditions that I think are good examples
of of the sort of thing happening elsewhere in the
world of disease. First of all, there's five row dysplacea
also funds Progress CIVA or fo P FOP. We actually
(33:33):
have a long detailed article about this at how stuff
Works dot com. Uh, you just put FOP in there,
you will get to it. This is really it's not
just pictures of me um. Why do you have any
history with FOP or just or is that the palm
age using it? Yeah, my foppish nature. So this condition
(33:57):
has nothing to do with the floppish nature or hair only.
It is an extremely rare connective tissue disease, and it
involves the ossification of fibrous tissue, including muscle, tendon and
ligaments due them due to mutation of the body's repair mechanisms.
So this sounds very similar. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the
body is like stuff that is not bone turns to
(34:18):
bone and it's you know, it's a horrible condition, but
it's a very real condition and it's extremely rare, but
more common than ev you know what this is reminding
me of from popular culture And I don't know if
he got if he cooked this up from from something
or if he just you know, made it up off
the top of his head. In Game of Thrones, there's
(34:39):
that disease gray scale that they get. I wonder if
that is something from like E V that he uh,
maybe read about, or maybe maybe from FOP from what
we were maybe. So I feel like there's like, definitely
that leprosy was definitely an influence on that condition. I'm
also reminded of one on the show Look Around You.
(35:00):
They had a condition called cobbles where it was, uh,
this is a look around You as a show that
some of our listeners might be familiar with. It was
a britt of brilliant British satire of educational films, and
the second season, which was kind of like a kid's
weird science kind of show like that was there there,
what they were parenting? They and they roll out this
(35:22):
character who has cobbles and so he's essentially just a
big pile of rocks, voiced by one of the actors
that went on to play a part in A Little Britain.
Oh really, okay, okay, yeah, you know it sounded familiar
and now I think that maybe why I've seen it. Yeah,
so maybe I don't know, maybe Cobbles was an influence
on George. Cobbles influenced gray scale and yeah, if I
(35:43):
remember correctly from the Lower and Game of Thrones, was
it like if you're touched by somebody with gray scale,
then you also get gray scale? I think so, like
it's pretty easy to contract and certainly seemed to to
to shadow leopardsy. Yeah, okay, so we've got some other
ones here. Yes, there's also Lifeopedean babies or stone babies. Uh.
These are formed when a fetus growing outside of the
(36:05):
uterus dies. They're too large for reabsorption, so they calcify
this is extremely rare. They're about three d known cases
and they generally occur with a topic pregnancy. So these
are embryo implants that occur somewhere other than the uterus,
you know what. I feel like I've seen an example
of this before. Uh. And I maybe talked about this
(36:26):
on this show before, and maybe I just talked to
you about it off air. Uh. Mrs In Jemmy, have
I talked to you about her before? She is a
pathologist or maybe she's a pathologist assistant who has an
Instagram account of all the stuff that comes through her
lab and it's fascinating. And she started doing a YouTube
series and someone brought in a fetus in a jar
(36:50):
that they had in like a curiosity shop or something
like that, and I want to say, and maybe misremembering this,
but that it had calcified. And she was like, Oh,
this is the stone baby thing. Is this related to
the Muti Museum? Uh? You know what? I because I
feel like I read that they have one of these. Yeah,
that might be it. I don't think that the version
(37:10):
that was brought to her was from the muter Museum.
But she's in I want to say, she's in New
York and muters in Philadelphia, right, so it's not that
far away from one another. Cool. Yeah, there's also a
there's also a really good Jezebel article about stone babies,
so I'll have to link to that on the landing
page for this episode. Al right. Next, of course there's
and this is another one that light tree man disease
(37:31):
has gained a lot of traction with just sort of
like look at this picture sharing on social media, and
that is cutaneous horns. So these are unusual, you know,
carroteen skin tumors. They may look like horns, they may
look like wood or even coral. Uh. And this in
one of the main causes here seems to be radiation
exposure to hands or face especially or they can also
(37:54):
emerge from burn wounds, but certainly exposure to the sun
can play a role in um, you in strengthening the effect. Yeah,
I could see those being especially tantalizing in the world
of social media, especially um when we did that article
and transdermal implants on how stuff works, that was a
huge hit, and that's people giving themselves horns. So I
(38:14):
imagine if if it's sort of a like uh uh disease,
then it's it's going to attract some attention as well. Yeah, indeed,
and and with cutainous horns, you know, the treatment is
a little simpler and it also tends to be less
of a severe manifestation, you know. It's so it's it's
easier to deal with, but also rare. And then finally this, uh,
(38:35):
this last example is also thankfully very rare because it
concerns uh a few individuals of the of what are
known in Japan is the uh hyvakusha or the explosion
affected people UH. And this is an individuals who survived
the atomic bomb blast at the close of the Second
(38:55):
World War. UM in particular, some Hiroshiama bombs of Iver's
apparently manifested strange rod shaped black nail growths. So essentially
what happened is they lost their nails and the explosion
and they were horribly burnt. But then out of the wounds,
these black rods grew out and they weren't just typical
(39:18):
nails because they had active blood vessels inside them, so
if they broke, they would bleed. Yeah, it's horrible, horrible situation. Say,
And like I say, luckily this is not something that
has occurred with the sort of regularity that would allow
it to be studied in. Yeah, it was almost gonna
make it. Well, yeah, I was going to make a
joke and now I'll metta tell you about the joke
(39:38):
I was going to make our colleague Josh Clark from
stuff you should know. I don't know what he did,
like maybe he slammed his fingernail into a door or
something like that, but he had a black fingernail for
a couple of months last year, and when we were
shooting video for series like brain Stuffer for this stuff
you should know video series, all the comments and YouTube,
they were just hyper fixated on the black fingernail and
(40:00):
we probably just had it was like blood, I think
that's what it was. Yeah, but you know, Josh like
he didn't want to respond or tell anybody what actually happened,
so we would just kind of mess with people after
a while. And uh so I was going to say, like, oh, well,
that black fingernails, that's what Josh has. Turns out it
is way worse. That is horrifying. Yeah. Yeah, and certainly
if you want more dis horrifying, not intern only in
(40:22):
terms of like this is a horrifying example of what
can happen to human body. But just like this is
a horrifying example of where humanity can go. Certainly there's
some other resources out there on the internet about the
explosion affected people. Okay, well that do we how do
we dig our way out of that? That is really Yeah,
we've we've really given you a plethora of terrible diseases.
(40:45):
Uh to listen to us talk about uh and maybe
think some more about uh, you know, after you've listened
to the podcast. I am, however, curious, because I know
a lot of scientists and grad students listen to this show.
If there's information out there about any of these things,
but in particular about tree man disease or e V
that we missed and that you you know, you want
(41:06):
to make sure that we get out there to our listeners,
please write in and tell us about it. We can
share that in a future episode. Yeah, and I would.
I would also challenge everybody that because pictures like this
that go around UH and and little sort of you know,
shallow news stories about individuals with the deformities of strange
medical con conditions, these are not going to go away. Dude.
This is just a part of being on the internet.
(41:28):
So I would just challenge everybody that, as these examples
come up in your Facebook feed or and you know,
your whatever, your news service of choices, Uh, look at
yourself a little bit, like do a little self reflection
and you know, ask yourself, why am I drawn to this?
Why can I not look away? What does this say
about the human condition? Was to say about me? And
(41:48):
then also you know, go a little deeper if possible,
if the material presents itself, to find out a little
more about who the person is and then what the
condition is. Well put, Yeah, I mean that's something that
we often try to do because it's work for us.
It's our job. But so for instance, like I'll see
a link to something like a tree man photo on
(42:08):
like the Daily Mail or something like that, right, and
that maybe like a starting point, But for me, I'm like, well,
I want to dig deeper here. I want to find
out some more about this and also like what's going on?
Why is this something I'm attracted to? Right? So, like
we talked about in like our previous episodes about Wicked
Problems are also the Cargoism episode that we did, right, Like,
there's a little bit more participation that's available to us.
(42:30):
As citizens now in science, right, not just as consumers
of basically you know, just what would be like moderny
equivalent of of a freak show, right, Like like when
you click on that, it's the equivalent of paying a
nickel to walk through, uh, and to see the tree
man or whatever. Right, and and maybe give it a
little bit more thought than that. And also you know
(42:52):
what these poor individuals are going through. Indeed, now on
that high note, if you want to write to us
and tell us some more. Maybe you know more about this,
Maybe you're a geneticist, that would be great, and you
understand all the scientific jargon that I couldn't penetrate. Let
us know the best ways to get in touch with us. First,
you can start on social media. We're on them, pretty much,
(43:15):
all of them were on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're
on tumbler, and we are on Instagram. Now, uh and
where else? What's the good old fashioned way they can
reach out to Well, first of all, of course, there's
stuff to blow your mind dot com and that's where
you'll find this podcast, all the other podcast blog post
videos links to those social media accounts. And also there
is a rumbling that the website will will become updated
(43:37):
in the months ahead. There's no definite timeline on that,
but we're excited about seeing a facelift that happened there.
And then Yeah, the old old fashioned way is to
just shoot us an email, and you can do that
by writing us at Blow the Mind how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(44:05):
Is it how stuff Works dot com. The big
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from housetop dot com.
Hey you welcome to stop to blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Brown and I'm Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
have you ever had like a warped or any kind
of I don't know, just weird growth. Um. Yeah, I've
(00:26):
had things of that nature. I had sort of like
an ingrown hair once that went to the dermatolgist about
and they're like sliced it out, and yeah, that's like,
I think, pretty common for most people. In fact, like
just recently, you know, I'm closing in on forty and
and just recently I went to the doctor and I
had like this weird growth and like I'm not gonna
(00:47):
detail where it was, but it was, you know, the
lower quadrant kind of uncomfortable and uh, did you have
eyes or amount? No eyes yet? It wasn't there yet,
but I was worried about eyes. And I said to
my doctor, what is this do I need to worry?
Is a cancer? And he was like, oh, that's a
skin tag. Those are super common, don't worry about it.
(01:08):
And then he like whipped out liquid nitrogen and right
there just froze it off. My body and burned it off,
and uh, you know, I can imagine just having that
one little thing. I was like super freaked out of course,
Like the thought is just, oh, it's cancer, right. Uh.
But today we're gonna talk about a disease in which,
(01:28):
like we're not just talking about like warts or skin
tags here, but like people's entire bodies overgrow with these
bark like lesions to the point that they're referred to
as tree men. Yeah. They're kind of talking about some
of the well certainly rare, but also like worst case
um situations in which you have out of control growth
(01:50):
going on with your body and yet you were continuing
to live with it. Yeah, and so it's just it's
it's actually referred to the medical term, let's take it
slowly here, epidermo dysplasia verisiformists, and but most people call
it tree man disease. Yeah, and we may call it
(02:10):
e V. Yeah this episode, just to keep it simple,
but also maybe not refer to it, uh with this
more fantastic connotations. And those of you out there, you
have maybe seen pictures of guys like this before. It's
not just men. Actually I shouldn't say guys. There have
been women who have had the disease as well, but
it's incredibly rare, like super rare. So we're like, we
couldn't find any statistics on how rare it actually is.
(02:32):
There's only like three pretty well documented cases and those
are in the last like let's say, like twenty or
thirty years. Uh. And but what's particularly interesting about this
to me and I want to keep in mind as
like we're going forward and talking about this disease, which
is fascinating and the medical science curiosity that I think
is worthy of the show, but also that like there's
(02:53):
a what I call kind of elephant man syndrome thing
going on here with these with patients of tree man disease. Yeah,
where you get a little media outlets just swarm on
these people. Um and in particular, they will take a
lot of pictures of them, uh, follow them around. In
one case, there was a guy who I think he
(03:14):
was He was followed by at least two different TV
stations that were multiple documentaries made about him. One of
the TV channels UH paid for his medical surgeries because
there and we'll talk about it. There's treatment available for
people with tree Man disease or e V. But Um,
there's also just a weird kind of Yes, this is
(03:36):
a medical curiosity, but also like a sideshow barker kind
of gaze to it. Yeah, it is. It is a
weird area to get into because you know, we were
as as a population, we're kind of drawn to these
these examples. We we can't look away. There's a there
is a definite grotesque quality to these to these conditions,
(04:01):
and you know that, like I said that there they
can be nightmareck to behold, and so we're interested in them.
And then also we you know, everyone loves a story
of somebody overcoming a situation. Everybody loves a story in
which medical science is able to triumph over you know,
disfiguration and disease. And so yeah, we want we want
(04:22):
to document these stories. We want to see the stories.
We want to see that before and after that, you know,
the marvelous transformation. But on the other hand, yeah, there's
this exploitive aspect of it as well. I've been watching
that TV show Penny Dreadful lately. You know what that is.
It's like I watched the first season. Okay, yeah, so
there's like, you know, no spoilers here, but but it's
set in the late nineteenth century, and there's freak shows
(04:46):
are sort of a thing that are you know, are
talked about and and sort of alluded to in the show,
especially because some of the you know, some of the
characters are werewolves and Frankenstein and and vampires and stuff
like that. So there's there's that kind of alluding Asian
going on. And they even referenced John Merrick at one point. Uh.
But in It's so I guess maybe I'm hyper sensitive
(05:08):
to it because I'm watching that show. And then I
was doing the research on this, and I was just like, well, yeah,
a hundred hundred and fifty years ago, the only way
that these these guys with e V would have gotten
by is by being in some kind of quote unquote
freak show, you know. Uh. And then and even then,
there wouldn't have been any treatment for them. They probably
would have succumbed to the cause, or rather the symptoms
(05:31):
of the disease. Yeah, it's one of those situations where
that the disease does in fact seems so rare that
when when you look back through different myth cycles trying
to find examples of where it might have occurred, and
certainly it's possible cases of of e V occurred and
we're just misdiagnosed and something like leprosy or some other
duh deformity. But you don't, I mean, you see some
(05:54):
examples of people turning into trees, uh and then turning
into it two would in myth cycle and you know,
and in literature, I mean certainly that the example that
comes to my mind is the the wood of suicides
in Dante's Inferno, and uh, and there are a few
other cases as well, like there's um, you know, you
can look to the case that the art of Hieronymous Bosh.
(06:17):
You can see speaking trees in various myths. In some
strains of Authorian legend, Merlin is turned into a tree,
or he's imprisoned within a tree tree by the Lady
of the lake. It's but but for the most part,
you I mean, you have these other examples of petrification
occurring in myths, but not so much like people becoming
living trees. Which makes me wonder if like like that
(06:37):
just underlines how rare it is that they didn't even
really affect our our folklore and if it's a modern
condition too, because as we'll discuss, uh, you know, the
things that we that make it worse are somewhat industrial
in nature, but uh, I don't know. I think of
like D and D monsters, like dryads and things like
(06:59):
that at or like Tolkien obviously Tolkien's ends, right, but
those aren't even more than a hundred years old. I mean,
dryads obviously exist within within myth and fairy tales and
things like that, but uh, yeah, I don't know. There
doesn't seem to be a lot of precedent for this,
um And so that's one of the things that's really
fascinating about this condition is whether or not it's brand
(07:23):
new or if it's something that's just been hidden away
carefully throughout throughout history. But yeah, it's it's unpleasant. Um.
I guess let's get into like the details of just
like what it is exactly, so we're not just kind
of talking about, you know, the broad strokes of people
who have barked growing off their bodies. So it's a
(07:43):
condition in which your body becomes extremely suscepti susceptible to
the human papaloma virus otherwise known as HPV. And what
happens is you, you know, you take on that that
virus it causes branch or bark like skin growths to
develop across your entire body. And in most cases this
(08:05):
is on the hands and feet. Uh. And they're basically
malignant skin tumors. Uh. And when I'm saying, I mean,
if you're listening to this and you're trying to picture
it and you haven't seen it before we've posted about
it on social I'm sure that the thumbnail for this
episode will have some kind of image that will give
you an idea of what it looks like. There's there's
photos of two of the guys we're gonna talk about today.
(08:27):
But it's it goes beyond just like your skin turning
to bark. It's it literally looks like roots are growing
out of your hands and feet and just huge growths
to the point where, uh, these people can't function, they
can't have jobs, they must be in pain, I would assume, Yeah,
I mean it's it's out of control growth. It looks
(08:48):
like it looks like some sort of a molding accident
with like a plastic figuring that sort of thing, you know, Yeah, yeah, um.
And what's also really interesting is some of the research basically,
you know, they had come to a point where they
were like, well, this is a thing that usually happens
to people who are forty or older, but now most
(09:09):
of the examples we're seeing are actually happening to people
in the early years of life, which they think is
because of a combination of uh, industrialized sort of ecosystems
that we live in and working outdoors, and we'll get
to that, but basically sunlight makes it worse, and also
renal transplant recipients and immunosuppressed patients have an increased risk
(09:33):
of developing these allegians that we're talking about here. Yeah,
and it's worth mentioning. So the immunosuppression here too. Obviously,
you know, it made me think of this and then
it does pop up in the literature. But it's a
lot like HIV in the in the sense that the
a lot of the literature compares the lesion growths to
the same kind of lesions that some patients who have
(09:53):
HIV get um, but they don't grow as out of
control in HIV these case. Um. So, okay, we all
hear HPV get thrown around a lot. There's a lot
of like anti STD commercials on TV or at least
at least at least the TV I'm watching. I get
talked to about HPV all the time, but it's worth
(10:13):
probably revisiting, I think. Right. So, human papilloma virus this
is the kind of thing. It's a sexually transmitted infection.
UH in the US. It belongs well, not just in
the US, UH, it belongs to a family of more
than a hundred and different strains of virus that can
cause warts on your toes and your fingers, are all
(10:34):
throughout your body. UM. Thirty in particular, of these hundred
different strains are spread as an STD. Those infections are
generally in the genital area, you know, for obvious reasons.
And you actually mentioned too that we've we've known about
hand plant are external and ano genital warts since antiquity,
but it's only in the last hundred thirty years we've
(10:55):
recognized laryn g awards and tream and disease as we're
discussing here, and only since the sixties and seventies that
we've made that connection to HPV. Yeah, And what's kind
of interesting here is is there's a lot of academic
research into this and it seems like they've pretty much
got it nailed down in terms of like what causes it,
why we why we get it, but that it's so
(11:19):
h incredibly rare that there aren't a lot of case
studies to operate with. Uh so, but with HPV, not
with e V. There's no cure, but there's preventative vaccines
and physicians can remove the infected tissue right probably the
same way like I described with the good old liquid
nitrogen being broken out. I had a wart on my
(11:40):
finger for the longest time, and they did the same
thing with that. They broke out the liquid nitrogen and
then they took like a scalpel and dug out some
of the stuff out of there. Afterwards, Um, yeah, my
thing I had removed is like was right in the
middle of my chest and like you can't even tell
that it was there now, but it was. It was
weird because that the like after I had it there
was I had to to like not swim or do
(12:02):
any kind of like yeah opening exercises, and every time
I would even imagine it, I would imagine just like
opening up my trip open, all my skin falling up. Yeah. Yeah,
it's weird, especially like it's one of those things where
it feels like your body is turning against you. And
I'm just talking about these kind of like first world
little growths that that you know, I've experienced where it's
(12:23):
like I can't imagine just like your entire body just
growing out of control like this. Well, as you get older,
it's like your body changes his priorities where you know,
you're you're you're asking the body. You're saying, hey, body,
how about healing up this little you know, elbow injury
I sustained. Can we get some forces working on that?
And the bodies like, sorry, I gotta grow this nose
(12:44):
hair And you're like, how does that make over? Here?
This is more important? Well, you know, if if you
don't know a lot about HPV, and I'll be honest,
I didn't know a ton about it, but it's it's
actually a pretty common thing. Twenty million America have it.
That's why we see these commercials and such as a
lot of like health warnings about it of sexually active
(13:06):
people will get it at some point in their lives.
Six point two million Americans. That's way more than listen
to our show. But we'll like, we'd like to get
every person who has HPV to listen to the show. Uh,
they will get a new infection every year. And here's
the thing, most people who get it don't even know
it because they don't necessarily display the symptoms. They don't
(13:27):
all get these growths, right Uh. And in rare cases,
pregnant women who have HPV can pass it on to
their babies during birth. What often happens in that rare case, uh,
is the infants will get the growths in their throat
or on their voice box. Um. So that sounds unpleasant,
(13:47):
but but that's something that's fairly treatable. Like I said,
there's a vaccine. U e V or tree man disease
is basically like this gune totally haywire, just like the
extreme exam bowl. And again, we can't emphasize enough how
rare this is. So rare that it's only in our
modern Uh. It's only with our modern population and the
(14:09):
greatest population of humans ever and with our with our
media integration. Uh that we've been that that that it's
something that the average person might be aware of. Yeah, absolutely, uh. One.
Just like last comparison with HPV, so in HPV, the
growths are described as appearing as like soft cauliflower shaped lumps.
(14:29):
And there's been a strong connection found between HPV, HPV
and cervical cancer and women. So it is a major
health concern. Uh, and we know that smoking and recreational
drug use can make it worse because they suppress the
immune system. So there you go that that kind of
ties together with e V. Right, and that uh there's
that suppressed immune system causing the growth to be a little,
(14:52):
a little out of control. But also I wouldn't describe
the growths with e V as soft cauliflower from what
I've seen. Uh, there they look like bark, really looks
like And there's a lot of scientific terms that will
get into for like how how the different kinds of
growths are defined, but uh, yeah, it's it's something entirely
(15:13):
foreign to my experience. Okay. So one article that we
turned to in particular that was just sort of like
a a general overview of this disease is epidermisplasia varius,
aformist colon and early and unusual presentation by Emson and Caballer,
(15:34):
And they outline basically like a history of what we
know about this disease and sort of where where we've
gotten to with it. It was first described in ninety
two by scientists lou Lewin Dowski and Lutts, so sometimes
it's called Lewandowski and Lutts. Uh like dysplasia, I think,
um so if you're having like, if you're looking for
(15:55):
information about it, I found like obviously tree man disease
pops up a lot of which is so does epidermis,
p blajia, verisa formist. But there's also different stuff that's
titled under the Lewandowski and Lutz heading as well. In
ninety nine, that's when we found out there there was
a relationship between it and high risk skin cancer, so
(16:16):
they kind of put the two together U E. V.
The way that it works is that there are mutations
on two of our genes in the people who get it,
ever one and ever two genes, and this is in
particular on chromosome chromosome seventeen Q two five. Now, there
(16:38):
was a lot of academic literature on the genetics behind this,
but it went way over my head and I felt
like it wouldn't be particularly useful to us or to
the audience. But just know there's a lot out there
if you're if you know your genetics and you want
to learn more about this, there's plenty to be found. Um,
what basically from what I could gather is that it
causes a defect of cell mediated community and this leads
(17:01):
the patients to be abnormally susceptible to the HPV uh.
And in some studies they said that it's specifically HPV
five and eight and then sometimes HPV fourteen, seventeen, twenty
and forty seven. Those are the ones that tend to
cause the bark growths. And these mutations have also been found.
There's a lot of research on this, but it was
(17:23):
also pretty impenetrable to me with my background. Uh. It's
found to inhibit and bote and complicate zinc distribution in
the human body, so that may also have something to
do with these weird growths as well. So the bark
here is described as an eruption of macules and papules
that are war like. So I guess this is where
like the soft color flower, it may look hard in
(17:45):
the pictures, but it's probably you know, war like in texture. Yeah.
And again, like in the in the research, there was
a lot of uh, just really in depth description of
the types of growths using words that I had no
idea what it or. Uh. So they'll they'll actually also
be other cutaneous lesions that form as well, and maybe
(18:05):
some of these are a bit harder. Uh, and these
are similar to what are found on AIDS patients as
as we've already mentioned scaly patches, etcetera. Now, these malignancies
don't usually manifest until at least forty years of age,
but because of more outdoor occupation and sun exposure. And
this is key because we may come back to this
with some related conditions. It's now beginning to showing younger people.
(18:27):
So because sun exposure can hasten the transformation, especially if
the patient is living at a high altitude. Yeah, that
seems to be another factor that they're concerned about. All Right,
we're gonna take a break and we come back. We're
going to discuss uh what we know about the treatment
of of e V. And we may also discuss just
a few related conditions that involve hardened skin growths. Okay,
(18:59):
so we're back. There have been many treatments that have
been tried on e V or tree man disease, and
I have to be honest that they have either been
ineffective or had only temporary results. So we've got oral
and topical retinoids that have been used interfere on immunotherapy,
electro desiccation. That sounds brutal. Yeah, this is uh basically
(19:24):
what this consists of. It's essentially like an electro cauterizing tool,
so you're you're you're destroying the tissue directly, uh, and
you're also preventing bleeding from from happening. Okay. That sounds
kind of like what I had with that war, Like
they scraped it off with a blade and then they
applied the liquid nitrogen like directly like open skin to
basically destroy the tissue. Yeah. Yeah, It's apparently a pretty
(19:46):
common dermatology technique. Okay. And the last one listed here
is cryrotherapy, which I imagine is what I had, uh
with using the liquid nitrogen. Okay. Some of the research indicates, however,
that if you apply radiotherapy to this, it may actually
cause the malignant transformations of skin lesions, so it makes
(20:07):
it worse. So that kind of goes in whether we're
talking about earlier with the exposure to the fun Yeah exactly,
And this is what led them to think like, oh,
maybe you know these people who have this genetic mutation
combined with working outdoors. Uh is somehow, you know, causing
these two to overgrow when they normally wouldn't UM. So,
(20:29):
the most effective thing that they have available right now
is surgical treatment, and it's basically doctors going in and
exercising the growths and then grafting other skin flaps over
them as a replacement um. And during surgery, these doctors
have to be really careful because they don't want to
hurt any major nerves or cause any other health issues.
But I mean, like again, like if you've seen the
(20:49):
photos of people who are afflicted with this, it's pretty
hard to tell what you would be carving into, you know.
I mean I imagine, like, let's take the hand just
as an example, like the structure of the skeletal structure
and the uh you know, blood and dermis and all
that that's in your hand would be there. But then
(21:10):
there's just this massive pounds and pounds of bark like
growths over it. So you've got to take it pretty slowly. Yeah,
I mean, in a sense, and this is simplifying, you're
kind of having to to carve the original form out
of the extra tissue. Yeah. So we have two examples
that we're going to touch on today, and these are
relatively recent during the last like ten years UM. And
(21:32):
from what I could find, other than these two guys,
there was like one other person that was a named
case study uh and he was in Romania. And then
a lot of the other research referred to people that
they used as case studies. But I imagine that those
patients wanted their identities to be anonymous, so they didn't
(21:53):
use names, but they would say, like, for instance, like
one of the big case studies looked at a girl
who had worked on a farm at a high altitude,
worked outdoors, been exposed to a lot of sunlight. She
had tree man disease UH, and they were able to
they basically walked through like here's how it developed, here's
how the surgery went with her, YadA, YadA. But they
(22:13):
never named her. The two big ones that we know of,
the first is a guy named Abul Bajendra and he's
in Bangladesh and he uh this is relatively recently, slowly
lost his ability to work as these dozens of two
to three inch roots grew out of his hand uh.
And he was a bicycle puller. That was his job
(22:36):
and he had to stop doing it. I imagine that's
from my experiences in Southeast Asia. I imagine that's like
when you pull like a tuck tuck like carriage or
something like that. Yeah. Um. And then so what happened
was there was a team of surgeons at DOCA Medical
College Hospital that found out about his condition and they
offered to remove his growths, and the hospital itself way
(23:00):
of the costs. But it required multiple operations over time
to remove eleven pounds of growths from his hands and feet.
And there is an interview with his sister and she
said before that just hundreds of people would come and
visit his home over the years just to witness quote
unquote the tree man. Right. So there is a kind
(23:22):
of like mythical sort of I think, like uh, supernatural
quality to it, you know that that people probably are like, oh,
what is this thing? Yeah? I mean people would just
want to know why does this occur? Not only medically
but also teleologically. You know. In fact, when I was
doing some research for this one and trying to find
(23:43):
some some additional studies on it, like I found a
blog where where somebody's devoted entire blog to like disproving Christianity,
and this was one of their examples, they were like
this this exists, therefore there can be no God um,
which you know, I'm not going to get into the
particulars of that argument because I don't think it's quite
(24:05):
as simple as that, but but certainly, like that's the
kind of response people have, Like you see something like this,
and you have how does this fit into my worldview
that this is occurring? Uh? And then you know, how
does it fit into my worldview that this is how
we we treat these people and this is how some
of these people end up getting actual treatment for their condition. Yeah.
Based on a lot of like the stuff we've covered
(24:28):
in the past on the show, especially like thinking about
you know, for instance, the history of witchcraft, I could
very easily see like something like this happening to somebody
in a village, doesn't matter where the village is, uh,
and the people in that society going, oh, they've been cursed. Yeah,
Like if I remember, someone is to blame, Yeah, if
(24:49):
I remember correctly. In Britain, one of the big witch
hunting tropes was that the witch would have a familiar,
which you know means hey, there's a straight cat in
that neighborhood or fields it's act like you virtually little
or nothing that you need to trump up that charge.
But then the additional charges that since it is some
sort of a demonic familiar she has an extra nipple
(25:10):
on her body, defeat it. And of course all you
need for that is just like the smallest skin tag
skin tag or award, and then yeah, that's all you need. Yeah, totally.
So Yeah, so this kind of thing I could see.
And this is this is what's particularly weird to us
about this is any time we've ever covered sort of
a medical curiosity like this, there is like a lineage,
(25:31):
like a trace throughout history of how it's been mythologized
or viewed by people. Tree man disease just doesn't seem
to pop up. Yeah, not specifically anyway. I mean, certainly
they're deformed characters throughout mythology and folklore, but but those
probably seem like different things. Like you know, we talked
(25:51):
about the elephant man at the top. Clearly that was
a very different condition. Yeah. Well, so there's the other
guy that's relatively I guess famous for having this disease.
He was in Indonesia's name was Day Day or d D.
Kaswara Uh and He had thirteen pounds or six kilograms
(26:11):
of these warts surgically removed from his body. He was
operated on at the Hassan Sadecan Hospital in West Java.
Here's the thing, Uh, he went through the surgery surgery
process and uh, even after the surgeries, they just kept returning.
You know, It's it's there right Like he he doesn't
have the genes for the to have an immune system
(26:35):
that will suppress HPV, so it's just continually going. Yeah,
and that's that's heartbreaking to think. I've imagine just going
through this, this tremendous surgery to rid yourself of these
growth and then they come back. Uh. And so this
was a guy that was highlighted in a lot of
Western media. Uh. He even appeared on our our old employers,
the Discovery Channel. I believe they had some kind of
(26:57):
a documentary or maybe a TV series episode about him.
So maybe some of you out there had seen something
like that. In fact, when I posted a picture not
of him, but of the guy from Bangladesh on on
Facebook yesterday, a lot of people said, oh, yeah, yeah,
I saw that on TV. I remember seeing this guy. Yeah,
and again it's it's weird. It puts me in a
(27:18):
weird place to to see that sort of thing, because
on one hand, it's great that, say, a TV production
company is going to pay for someone like this to
get the treatment they need. But on the other hand,
you get into that elephant man area right right to
what extent is this exploitation? Um? Yeah? And in fact,
Discovery paid for some of his medical bills for him
(27:41):
to have these multiple surgeries over and over again. Uh
so yeah, it is. It's a little I don't know,
it feels like there's an ethical quandary there, and I
don't know where I quite come down on it, right, So,
like thinking about it from our perspective, because obviously we
are part of the media. If you're listening to us
out there, you know, you're probably going, hey, Robert and Christian,
you guys are you know, being a little facetious here,
(28:02):
But we we recognize that, right. But it's sort of like, uh,
we wouldn't be able to fully cover and bring to
you the information about this disease if those these two
cases did Cassara and um Apple Gendre, if those weren't
thoroughly covered by the media. And that's where I first
(28:24):
found out about it, and then got the idea, let's
dig further into the academic literature. Otherwise, you know, I
wouldn't have known about it unless like I was a
genetic student or something like that, right, um. And yet
at the same time, it's sort of like, uh, it
feels a little gross the way that they are. I
don't know if exploited is the right word or not,
(28:45):
but but you know, like, so, so I'll give you
an example. And we may or may not use these
pictures for the thumbnails for the episode, but I think, well,
at the very least, we'll have at least have the
pictures of the condition on the landing page for the episode,
so yeah, you know you'll be able to see speaking
see it there. In the case of Mr Bajendra, the photos,
(29:06):
you know, there's something like I don't know in our
stock photo collection, like twenty photos of of him in
various angles, holding up his hands or holding up his
feet or sitting in an awkward position to showcase his disease.
And as I was looking at I was like, well,
this is useful because it gives us a visual representation
of it. But then at the same time, like I
could just see that this guy was uncomfortable, he felt
(29:28):
weird about it. Uh. He didn't quite know what to
do with himself, you know. And you could tell, like
off camera there was somebody who was like, Okay, can't you,
you know, tilt your hand a little bit more this
way or whatever, and he just looks, you know, like
a deer in headlights, like he's scared, you know. Uh,
And so that that feels weird. But getting back to
(29:50):
kaskas Wara, Sorry I'm probably butchering these names. He very
first noticed his condition after he cut his knee when
he was a teen nature, which is interesting to me, Like,
I don't know how that connects, especially given like what
we know about high altitudes and sunlight and such and
and uh, but like maybe the way it healed, like yeah, um,
(30:14):
but it it ultimately led to ruin for him, you know,
as these growths grew out of control, he lost his job,
his wife left him, he was shunned by his family. Uh.
And then you know, the sad part of this is
is that even after getting all of these surgeries, just
recently in the last couple of months, he passed away. Uh.
And as far as I can tell, it was a
result of complications I don't know if it was necessarily
(30:36):
from e V, but he had complications with hepatitis, liver,
and gastric disorders. Uh, and so maybe the the e
V was somehow affecting those, or maybe it was just
another condition he had entirely. Yeah, I think a lot
of a lot of our fascination with it comes down
to the fact that this is kind of an extreme
and just overtly visual example of what so many of
(30:59):
our bodies eventually do. Our bodies eventually developed problems that
mess up our lives and in many cases in our lives. So,
you know, we this is just kind of an outrageous
and arguably monstrous example of of of a of a
reality that we're all going to face. Yeah, it's especially
uh you know, like there's there's that kind of old trope,
(31:22):
especially in horror literature, which you out there know that
Robert and I are fond of, uh, the idea of
decaying beauty, right, Uh, and that especially in Western culture
that like we prize our good luck so much that
when they start to fade, will do anything to keep them. Uh.
The old Dorian Gray myth right, our story, it's not
(31:42):
really myth. Oscar Oscar Wilde wrote a story Penny Dreadful
Again during Crazy Character Yeah, uh and uh yeah, it
makes me think of I just started reading this comic
book that's kind of related. It's called The Beauty, and
the premise of the comic book is that there's a
there's a sexually transmitted disease called the Beauty, and if
(32:02):
you get it, you your body basically becomes beautiful, become
more sexually attractive. Like the side effects the symptoms of
the disease make you skinnier, make your skin look clearer.
Uh and and so you subsequently, subsequently you have people
walking around who all look like supermodels, and it seems
(32:26):
like from what I've read so far, at least in
the first issue, uh, they spontaneously combust after a while.
Oh well, you know, that's about how it goes. That
might be a problems. That's how it goes for beautiful
people in our world. And you just you go out
in a blaze of glory. But yeah, that's where the
fascination with this comes from. I think, right like, people
see this and they go, oh my god, that's my
worst nightmare. Because like I had a mole that I
(32:49):
had to have removed, whereas like you know this, these
these poorer guys can barely move their hands, they can't
operate tools, they can't do their jobs or wives leave
them all that stuff. It's rough, all right. So at
this point you're probably wondering, well, okay, this is this
is one extremely rare condition, But aren't there other conditions
that can petrify uh flesh that indeed may have informed
(33:12):
some of these myth cycles that we've alluded to. Well, yes,
there are, there are several conditions. We're gonna just run
through four known conditions that I think are good examples
of of the sort of thing happening elsewhere in the
world of disease. First of all, there's five row dysplacea
also funds Progress CIVA or fo P FOP. We actually
(33:33):
have a long detailed article about this at how stuff
Works dot com. Uh, you just put FOP in there,
you will get to it. This is really it's not
just pictures of me um. Why do you have any
history with FOP or just or is that the palm
age using it? Yeah, my foppish nature. So this condition
(33:57):
has nothing to do with the floppish nature or hair only.
It is an extremely rare connective tissue disease, and it
involves the ossification of fibrous tissue, including muscle, tendon and
ligaments due them due to mutation of the body's repair mechanisms.
So this sounds very similar. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the
body is like stuff that is not bone turns to
(34:18):
bone and it's you know, it's a horrible condition, but
it's a very real condition and it's extremely rare, but
more common than ev you know what this is reminding
me of from popular culture And I don't know if
he got if he cooked this up from from something
or if he just you know, made it up off
the top of his head. In Game of Thrones, there's
(34:39):
that disease gray scale that they get. I wonder if
that is something from like E V that he uh,
maybe read about, or maybe maybe from FOP from what
we were maybe. So I feel like there's like, definitely
that leprosy was definitely an influence on that condition. I'm
also reminded of one on the show Look Around You.
(35:00):
They had a condition called cobbles where it was, uh,
this is a look around You as a show that
some of our listeners might be familiar with. It was
a britt of brilliant British satire of educational films, and
the second season, which was kind of like a kid's
weird science kind of show like that was there there,
what they were parenting? They and they roll out this
(35:22):
character who has cobbles and so he's essentially just a
big pile of rocks, voiced by one of the actors
that went on to play a part in A Little Britain.
Oh really, okay, okay, yeah, you know it sounded familiar
and now I think that maybe why I've seen it. Yeah,
so maybe I don't know, maybe Cobbles was an influence
on George. Cobbles influenced gray scale and yeah, if I
(35:43):
remember correctly from the Lower and Game of Thrones, was
it like if you're touched by somebody with gray scale,
then you also get gray scale? I think so, like
it's pretty easy to contract and certainly seemed to to
to shadow leopardsy. Yeah, okay, so we've got some other
ones here. Yes, there's also Lifeopedean babies or stone babies. Uh.
These are formed when a fetus growing outside of the
(36:05):
uterus dies. They're too large for reabsorption, so they calcify
this is extremely rare. They're about three d known cases
and they generally occur with a topic pregnancy. So these
are embryo implants that occur somewhere other than the uterus,
you know what. I feel like I've seen an example
of this before. Uh. And I maybe talked about this
(36:26):
on this show before, and maybe I just talked to
you about it off air. Uh. Mrs In Jemmy, have
I talked to you about her before? She is a
pathologist or maybe she's a pathologist assistant who has an
Instagram account of all the stuff that comes through her
lab and it's fascinating. And she started doing a YouTube
series and someone brought in a fetus in a jar
(36:50):
that they had in like a curiosity shop or something
like that, and I want to say, and maybe misremembering this,
but that it had calcified. And she was like, Oh,
this is the stone baby thing. Is this related to
the Muti Museum? Uh? You know what? I because I
feel like I read that they have one of these. Yeah,
that might be it. I don't think that the version
(37:10):
that was brought to her was from the muter Museum.
But she's in I want to say, she's in New
York and muters in Philadelphia, right, so it's not that
far away from one another. Cool. Yeah, there's also a
there's also a really good Jezebel article about stone babies,
so I'll have to link to that on the landing
page for this episode. Al right. Next, of course there's
and this is another one that light tree man disease
(37:31):
has gained a lot of traction with just sort of
like look at this picture sharing on social media, and
that is cutaneous horns. So these are unusual, you know,
carroteen skin tumors. They may look like horns, they may
look like wood or even coral. Uh. And this in
one of the main causes here seems to be radiation
exposure to hands or face especially or they can also
(37:54):
emerge from burn wounds, but certainly exposure to the sun
can play a role in um, you in strengthening the effect. Yeah,
I could see those being especially tantalizing in the world
of social media, especially um when we did that article
and transdermal implants on how stuff works, that was a
huge hit, and that's people giving themselves horns. So I
(38:14):
imagine if if it's sort of a like uh uh disease,
then it's it's going to attract some attention as well. Yeah, indeed,
and and with cutainous horns, you know, the treatment is
a little simpler and it also tends to be less
of a severe manifestation, you know. It's so it's it's
easier to deal with, but also rare. And then finally this, uh,
(38:35):
this last example is also thankfully very rare because it
concerns uh a few individuals of the of what are
known in Japan is the uh hyvakusha or the explosion
affected people UH. And this is an individuals who survived
the atomic bomb blast at the close of the Second
(38:55):
World War. UM in particular, some Hiroshiama bombs of Iver's
apparently manifested strange rod shaped black nail growths. So essentially
what happened is they lost their nails and the explosion
and they were horribly burnt. But then out of the wounds,
these black rods grew out and they weren't just typical
(39:18):
nails because they had active blood vessels inside them, so
if they broke, they would bleed. Yeah, it's horrible, horrible situation. Say,
And like I say, luckily this is not something that
has occurred with the sort of regularity that would allow
it to be studied in. Yeah, it was almost gonna
make it. Well, yeah, I was going to make a
joke and now I'll metta tell you about the joke
(39:38):
I was going to make our colleague Josh Clark from
stuff you should know. I don't know what he did,
like maybe he slammed his fingernail into a door or
something like that, but he had a black fingernail for
a couple of months last year, and when we were
shooting video for series like brain Stuffer for this stuff
you should know video series, all the comments and YouTube,
they were just hyper fixated on the black fingernail and
(40:00):
we probably just had it was like blood, I think
that's what it was. Yeah, but you know, Josh like
he didn't want to respond or tell anybody what actually happened,
so we would just kind of mess with people after
a while. And uh so I was going to say, like, oh, well,
that black fingernails, that's what Josh has. Turns out it
is way worse. That is horrifying. Yeah. Yeah, and certainly
if you want more dis horrifying, not intern only in
(40:22):
terms of like this is a horrifying example of what
can happen to human body. But just like this is
a horrifying example of where humanity can go. Certainly there's
some other resources out there on the internet about the
explosion affected people. Okay, well that do we how do
we dig our way out of that? That is really Yeah,
we've we've really given you a plethora of terrible diseases.
(40:45):
Uh to listen to us talk about uh and maybe
think some more about uh, you know, after you've listened
to the podcast. I am, however, curious, because I know
a lot of scientists and grad students listen to this show.
If there's information out there about any of these things,
but in particular about tree man disease or e V
that we missed and that you you know, you want
(41:06):
to make sure that we get out there to our listeners,
please write in and tell us about it. We can
share that in a future episode. Yeah, and I would.
I would also challenge everybody that because pictures like this
that go around UH and and little sort of you know,
shallow news stories about individuals with the deformities of strange
medical con conditions, these are not going to go away. Dude.
This is just a part of being on the internet.
(41:28):
So I would just challenge everybody that, as these examples
come up in your Facebook feed or and you know,
your whatever, your news service of choices, Uh, look at
yourself a little bit, like do a little self reflection
and you know, ask yourself, why am I drawn to this?
Why can I not look away? What does this say
about the human condition? Was to say about me? And
(41:48):
then also you know, go a little deeper if possible,
if the material presents itself, to find out a little
more about who the person is and then what the
condition is. Well put, Yeah, I mean that's something that
we often try to do because it's work for us.
It's our job. But so for instance, like I'll see
a link to something like a tree man photo on
(42:08):
like the Daily Mail or something like that, right, and
that maybe like a starting point, But for me, I'm like, well,
I want to dig deeper here. I want to find
out some more about this and also like what's going on?
Why is this something I'm attracted to? Right? So, like
we talked about in like our previous episodes about Wicked
Problems are also the Cargoism episode that we did, right, Like,
there's a little bit more participation that's available to us.
(42:30):
As citizens now in science, right, not just as consumers
of basically you know, just what would be like moderny
equivalent of of a freak show, right, Like like when
you click on that, it's the equivalent of paying a
nickel to walk through, uh, and to see the tree
man or whatever. Right, and and maybe give it a
little bit more thought than that. And also you know
(42:52):
what these poor individuals are going through. Indeed, now on
that high note, if you want to write to us
and tell us some more. Maybe you know more about this,
Maybe you're a geneticist, that would be great, and you
understand all the scientific jargon that I couldn't penetrate. Let
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you can start on social media. We're on them, pretty much,
(43:15):
all of them were on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're
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where else? What's the good old fashioned way they can
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you'll find this podcast, all the other podcast blog post
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is a rumbling that the website will will become updated
(43:37):
in the months ahead. There's no definite timeline on that,
but we're excited about seeing a facelift that happened there.
And then Yeah, the old old fashioned way is to
just shoot us an email, and you can do that
by writing us at Blow the Mind how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(44:05):
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