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| Foot illustration |
Doctors were left scratching their heads in a case they have never seen before.
A 55-year-old woman, who has remained unidentified, suffers from a rare disease called foot orgasm syndrome, and is the only known case in the world so far.
According to Dr. Marcel Waldinger who treated the woman and a professor in the Netherlands, this is the first known case of the syndrome, which causes the woman to experience up to six orgasms a day without any sexual thoughts or actions.
The woman had recently spent 18 months in a hospital, some of the time in a coma, due to a sepsis infection. When she awoke from the coma, she felt a tingling sensation in her left foot. Since then, any stimulus to her foot causes her to experience an orgasm.
Dr. Waldinger believes that the cause was due to the confusion in her brain signal, which may have happened while the woman was in a coma. Researchers, who published their findings of this case in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, believes that foot orgasms occur as a result of a signaling mix-up in the female brain caused by damage to the nerve fibers in the foot.
According to the researchers, the problem developed because the nerve that supplies information from the foot reaches the spinal cord at the same point as the nerve that provides information of the genital region. Therefore, as a result of damage to nerves, the brain was unable to differentiate between regions.
After an extensive study on the case, it was established that the woman could be treated with an injection of anesthesia into one of her spinal nerves. The woman agreed to go through with the treatment and it worked. The daily orgams in her foot had stopped.
Dr. Waldinger said that other people may suffer from the disease, but are too embarrassed to admit it or talk about it.