An Irish man spent a year and a half injecting himself with semen in an effort to cure his back pain, doctors discovered after he turned up at a hospital with a swollen, abscessed arm in addition to his chronic back condition.

The man willingly divulged the details of his "semen cure" when questioned, admitting he'd been injecting the manly medicine as an "innovative" treatment for his back pain once a month for the last 18 months, both intravenously and intra-muscularly, using a hypodermic needle he'd bought online.

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The "cure" was 100 percent his own idea – as well as his own manufacture – and developed without medical advice, he told doctors in the Dublin hospital as they presumably stared in disbelief.

While his primary complaint was a flareup of his back pain, the man's arm was found to be swollen with semen that had leaked into the surrounding tissues from failed injections – his last "dose" having apparently been a triple. Doctors x-rayed the limb just in case – perhaps believing (hoping?) the whole story was a monstrous hoax.

The patient's back improved enough while he was in the hospital for him to, er, discharge himself without opting to have the abscess in his arm drained.

Unable to find any other cases in the medical literature of a person injecting themselves with semen for any reason – and coming up empty even on "a search of more eclectic internet sites and forums" – Dr. L. Dunne wrote up the man's case for the January issue of the Irish Medical Journal in an article titled "'Semenly' Harmless Back Pain." Score one for science.

There's a moral to the story, according to Dunne, who called the case an example of "the dangers of venipuncture when carried out by the untrained layperson" as well as "the risks involved with medical experimentation prior to extensive clinical research" – doubtless soon to be immortalized in textbooks to the glee of future medical students.

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