Pork can stop life-threatening nosebleeds

Friday, December 5, 2014

In addition to being tasty and nutritious, that slice of cured pork may save your life. That is, if you have Glanzmann thrombasthenia, a rare condition that stops your blood from clotting.

The Associated Press reports that Dr. Sonal Saraiya, a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital of Michigan, tried the unorthodox "cure" as a last resort when treating a four-year-old patient with the above condition. "We had to do some out-of-the-box thinking," Saraiya told AP. "So that's where we put our heads together and thought to the olden days and what they used to do." Packing the child's nostrils with pork worked because "there are some clotting factors in the pork…and the high level of salt will pull in a lot of fluid from the nose."

But before you get all excited and start stuffing pork up your nose, please be advised that Saraiya does not advise this treatment for routine nosebleeds, as it could cause infection.

The finding earned Saraiya and her team the 2014 Ig Nobel Prize. The Ig Nobel is a tongue-in-cheek award handed out annually by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine, and honours goofy discoveries that have a practical application. BP