Weird ways of treating the dead

Every moment is precious when death is near and it is difficult and painful to see our near or dear one facing death.
Death is truth of life. Every culture has its own ways to treat the dead body. Most common are burial and cremation. But there are different cultures where dead are dealt in weird ways!
I came across this weird ways by random surfing and it inspired me to write a blog and share this information with you all....
So get ready and prepare yourself to experience something shocking!!!!!

• Space Burial.  

 Who doesn't want to go to space? Here is a chance, if not while you are alive, then you can go space after death...... Surprised! 

In the late years of the 20th Century, it became the vogue to be “buried in space,” that is, to have a small part of the cremated remains placed into a capsule (about the size of a tube of lipstick) and launched into space using a rocket. Since 2004, there have been about 150 space burials.

This is very expensive and not commonly chosen and only one company currently specializes in this service. In most cases, the remains are fired into Earth orbit, though some have been launched into other trajectories, including to the moon, Pluto, and deep space. Famous people who have been “buried” in space include James Doohan (“Scotty” of Star Trek fame), Gene Roddenberry (creator of the aforementioned Star Trek), Timothy Leary (American writer, psychologist, and drug campaigner), Clyde Tombaugh (American astronomer and discoverer of Pluto), Dr. Eugene Shoemaker (Astronomer and co-discoverer of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9), and Leroy Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, Jr. (American astronaut and one of the original Mercury Seven pilots).

•  Exposure.  

 This is not practiced in western world but was practiced when a person died in an isolated area and was noticed after few days. However, there are rituals where this is practiced on regular basis.

Tibetan sky burial (known as a jahtor ) is the ritual dissection of the body, which is then laid out for the animals or the elements to dispose of. Tibet is a mountainous land where the soil is too rocky to dig graves and there is a scarcity of fuel for cremation, so sky burial arose as a logical alternative.

After being sent on their way with ceremony, the remains of the deceased are toted up to a designated location, where the body is laid out (typically naked). Then the rogyapas strip the flesh from bones, limbs are hacked away and the whole is ground up and sometimes mixed with tsampa (a mixture of barley flour, tea, and yak butter or milk) and offered to the vultures (which have learned to keep watch on the traditional burial site). The rogyapas do not go about their task with somber ritual, but rather they laugh, joke and chat as in any other manual labor.

Mass burial

• Mass burial.   

Mass grave was once more common than today. When there is an epidemic outbreak or during wars its difficult to identify the body, mass burial is preferred. Locations known to harbor mass graves include The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Chechnya, Iraq and even the United States Hart Island is a potter’s field, a place intended for the burial of unknown or indigent people, for the city of New York. It is the largest tax-funded cemetery in the world and currently houses over 850,000 “residents,” dating as far back as the Civil War, and is still used even today.

•  Plastination.

As perhaps the ultimate bid for immortality, plastination is a technique used in anatomy to preserve bodies or body parts. The water and fat are replaced by certain plastics, yielding specimens that can be touched, do not smell or decay and even retain most properties of the original sample. The resultant plastinates can be manipulated and positioned as desired.

• Cryonics

Cryonics is the low-temperature preservation of humans and animals who can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Because, in the United States, cryonics can only be legally performed on humans after they have been pronounced legally dead, procedures ideally begin within minutes of cardiac arrest and use cryoprotectants to prevent ice formation during cryopreservation. However, the idea of cryonics also includes the preservation of people after longer post-mortem delays because of the possibility that brain structures encoding memory and personality may still persist or be inferable. Whether sufficient brain information still exists for cryonics to work under some preservation conditions may be intrinsically unprovable by present knowledge. Most proponents of cryonics, therefore, see it as a speculative intervention with prospects for success that vary widely depending on circumstances.

• Mummyfication 

The Egyptians are perhaps the best-known adherents of this process (although they are far from the only ones), in which a corpse has its skin and organs preserved, by either intentional or incidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity or lack of air. The oldest mummy found to date was a decapitated head that dates back to 6000 BC. The earliest Egyptian mummy dates back to about 3300 BC. The process is wel known to science.

The internal organs are removed and dried out using natron, and are then placed either in canopic jars, or else made into four packages to be reinserted into the body cavity. The brain is scrambled by means of a hook run up through the nasal cavity, then pulled out through the nose and discarded. The heart was considered to be the organ associated with intelligence and life force. The body cavity would then be washed out with spiced palm wine and filled with dry natron gum resin and vegetable matter. It was then placed in a bath of natron and left for as long as 70 days. This would dehydrate the body and better preserve the skin. The body cavity was then excavated and refilled with permanent stuffing, and, often, the viscera packages. The abdominal incision was closed, the nostrils plugged with wax, and the body anointed with oils and gum resins. The remains would then be wrapped in layers of linen bandages, between which amulets were inserted to guard the deceased from danger and evil.

• Aquamation 

Aquamation is the most environment-friendly way of disposal of human bodies. The process involves the rapid disintegration of the human body into high quality fertilizers. In comparison with cremation, about 10% of the energy is used, and all of the associated pollution is avoided.With Aquamation, an individual body is gently placed in a clean, stainless steel vessel. A combination of water flow, temperature (~90C) and alkalinity are used to accelerate the natural course of tissue hydrolysis. Typically the process takes about four hours to complete.

There are other methods like cannibalism (which exists only in our history, is humans eating humans), burial at sea,cremation, ground burial etc.

Now even after-death experience is cool...! So which method do you prefer for the disposal of your dead body?

Want to be an amputee?

Have you ever heard of a person having a burning desire to be an amputee???
Yes, You heard it right be an amputee!!!

What inspired me to write about BIID is a program in NGC- Taboo. A person from Sydney,Australia was suffering from BIID and went to extreme levels to amputate his left leg below his knees.

When there is a mismatch between the mental body image and physical body of a person, this makes the person feel that their hand/leg should not be the part of their body, it is alien and thus has a burning desire to amputate it. This neurological disorder is called Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID).

 In a layman's language its, "When a person's idea of how they should look does not match their actual physical form, it can be caused by Body Integrity Identity Disorder". Strange!

This condition effects very small percentage of population and its cause is unknown it is rare, infrequently studied and highly secretive condition. The person suffering from BIID feels isolated, cannot express his feelings to anyone not even to their close or loved ones as people think they are crazy. This creates a feeling of loneliness and less social life. They generally are ashamed of their thoughts and try to hide them from others, including therapists and health care professionals.The urge can be so severe that they they may try to injure themselves that may require an amputation of that limb.

The very thought of amputation makes a normal person scare, doesn't it? But for BIID person its a pleasure of being complete.

People often confuse BIID with a similar mental illness called Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) in which sufferers become fixated on a perceived flaw in their appearance or some slight physical abnormality. In BIID there is no flaw with the limbs, its a desire to amputate their healthy, functional limb. 

Many psychologists and neurologists have ventured theories into what causes this type of thought.The most accepted theory states that it is a neuro-psychological condition on the right side of the brain and could be related to somatoparaphrenia. The common leading idea is that Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID, occurs when the brain is not able to provide an accurate plan of the body.

The only treatment so far known is a surgery.

In 2000, Dr. Robert C. Smith, a surgeon from Scotland, made headlines when he amputated the healthy legs of two patients with BIID He said he was following the Hippocratic Oath by preventing his patients from resorting to more life-threatening options — but the medical community did not agree. Since then, it’s been virtually impossible for a person to find a surgeon willing to do the elective surgery, and many people with BIID have resorted to drastic and dangerous measures to induce amputation.

There are many such mental disorders which are rare, infrequently studied. The more science advances, the more nature creates challenges for it to solve.

To know more about  BIID log on to www.biid.org  and to know the story of John, BIID patient, log on to http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520811,00.html