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  • 2017-03-21 (xsd:date)
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  • Is It Possible to Kill a Man With a Swift Kick to the Groin? (en)
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  • Kicking, punching, or squeezing testicles has long been prized as an effective means to briefly incapacitate men, as it brings about a powerful full-body pain. The reasons for such a blow's power stems from the lack of protection the testes receive from the scrotum, the high concentration of pain receptors called nociceptors surrounding them, and the myriad interconnections between testicular nerves and organs throughout your body. The pain, medically called blunt scrotal trauma, typically subsides without incident. However, more serious complications can arise with enough force. Have such injuries resulted in death? Potentially, though most agree that other exacerbating factors have to be considered in addition to the testicular trauma. Perhaps one the earliest purported cases of death resulting from injury to the testicle was found in a brief but terrifying case report from 1843, which reads: Without further information, it is impossible to say what exactly happened in that specific incident. The reported heart attack suffered by thirteen-year-old boy whose testicles were squeezed as part of a schoolyard prank in 2014, however, may be illustrative of how (under rare and specific extenuating circumstances) stress from that kind of trauma could result in an immediate reaction similar to the 19th-century German account. Speaking to Vice News about the 2014 incident, Dr. Marc Bjurlin, a clinical instructor in Urologic Oncology at New York University, said that he can only speculate that the teenager had a hidden condition: A 2008 case report of a different thirteen-year-old who had been kicked in the groin during a football game describes how he came down with a life-threatening, infection-mimicking condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) after the trauma. This case report concluded that death from testicular trauma is a possibility that must be considered: SIRS was, additionally, blamed for the death of an eighteen-year-old male in India who injured himself riding a bicycle: Outside these rare (and still somewhat ill-defined) examples, the most plausible complications from testicular trauma are generally not life-threatening, though some (most notably trauma-induced testicular torsion) can lead to a loss of fertility or even the removal of a testicle if not properly treated. A 2004 consensus paper in BJU International outlined the potential injuries as a result of testicular trauma: While there have been cases in both the media and the scientific literature that report a connection between testicular trauma and fatalities, these case reports are speculative, sparse, and do not provide enough information to confidently demonstrate the mechanisms hypothesized behind them. A kick in the balls may lead to serious complications, but most urologists agree that death is not one of them. (en)
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