July 31, 2014 • 33 mins
There is a condition that can cause people to feel bugs crawling beneath their skin so acutely that they will use tweezers to pluck them from their eyeballs. It's a terrible disorder made worse by medicine's insistence it is all in sufferers' heads.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and Charles W. Chuck, Bryan Jerry are with me.
So of course as this should know. I know that
is false, sir, because this is probably the most interesting,
(00:25):
weirdest podcast we've done in a long long time. I
thought it was. I was I had never heard of this.
You sent it my way. I was like, all right,
some some disease, Like, let's cover some disease. And then
I started started reading it and I was just like,
what the world mind going on? And I still don't
know what's going on. It's totally fascinating. Well you are
(00:48):
in the majority, Chuck about not knowing about it. Yeah, yeah,
it's a mysterious disease of some sort and there's a
great battle going on. But is it even a disease?
Very controversial, that's the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah, And we're
um and we're talking about it based on an article
from how stuff Works. Um, what we're talking about is
(01:10):
I say more gelons, Chuck and Martin Basher say more gelons.
I saw on some pronunciation site more jellons. But we're
both gonna make a hard g sound. How about that.
We can agree on the hard g okay um. But
what we're talking about is this disease that was basically discovered,
(01:32):
first described in two thousand two. Initially that will make
your radar go up, because that is super new. But
the name itself is borrowed from a seventeenth century obscure
French medical text Morgelons more gelons, however you want to pronounce.
It was first used to describe some weird condition where
(01:56):
coarse hair grew out of the backs of children. If
you go on to any Morglon's research site and research
the origin of the name, you will also usually see
right afterwards a sentence that says, that's not what this is.
It's just this lady used the same name the first
person to describe it. That's a good way to say that,
(02:19):
because her son had it. Yeah, the the lady in
questions name was Mary Liteo. That's how I'm pronouncing her name.
No hard g um. But she had a two year
old who at the time was saying uh, bugs and
pointing to his lip and um, he had some sort
of sores around his lips, and when she looked closely,
(02:41):
she saw that there was some strange threads or string
or some fibers coming out of these sores and his lips,
and she became alarmed. She did and uh, she, like
almost every sufferer from this odd is it a disease
or not, since then, has had a really hard time
(03:05):
getting diagnosis, getting doctors to take her seriously. Um, so
much so that she formed a support group h and
a website, the More Gellons Research Foundation, And uh, I
guess we just need to get into it. I mean,
it is one of the oddest things I've ever heard.
It's dermacological, it's about the skin. Um. There are sores,
(03:28):
there's a lot of itching, and that The most mysterious
thing about it, though, is like you said, these blue, red, black,
and I think white fibers And you can look up
more gallons if you type in more gallons fibers and
immin search that you're gonna see these things. And they
just look like little threads coming out of your skin
(03:51):
or burrowed beneath your skin. So the thing is chuck,
is you know, fibers associated with sores on somebody's body. Weird,
but not the most mysterious thing in the universe. The
problem is is there's a guy, a professor of pharmacology
at Oklahoma State University named Randy Wymore who took an
(04:15):
interest in morgalance Diseasey doesn't have it himself, but he
read about it and thought, well, all we all you
have to do is you know, look at these fibers. Yeah,
it's probably an ingrown hair or something. And with the
research carried out independently by UM Dr why Moore, the
weirdness the legend began to grow because it was first
(04:39):
identified in two tho two, when I think in two
thousand five he heard about it and started researching. So
he got in touch with um morgalon sufferers and said, hey,
send me some of these weird fibers and I want
to check him out. And apparently when he asked for
some assistance and identifying what the fibers were, he found
that not all of them could be conclusively identified. Yeah,
(05:02):
like not as Oh well I can't tell is it
some weird animal hair or is it a cotton fiber?
Is it nylon? They weren't able to identify them at all.
As a it did not exist in the FBI database.
It was not plant or animal um or or and
(05:23):
it didn't match any of the eighty thousand plus synthetic
fibers that are in in the FBI database. Yeah, so
it literally was um. I mean, he he brought one
even to a specialist who I think from a police
department that does this for a living, looked at under
microscope and he was like, I've never seen anything like
(05:44):
this in my life. So the the the mystery took
root at that point. Oh yeah, in a big way. Um.
And the problem is, though, is the more morgelons are
more Gelon sufferers. We have no idea how many there are,
because the medical establishment has concluded that there's no such thing. Yeah.
(06:09):
I mean this article is written in what like two
thousand ten, it said fourteen thousand confirmed. But um, if
you're not being diagnosed, or if you're told you might
be crazy, which we'll get to in a minute, Um,
then yeah, who knows how many people? And man, it's
just it gets more and more interesting, it does, so. Um.
(06:30):
In addition to fibers, there's all sorts of horrible symptoms
that Morgelon sufferers report. So first of all, you feel
like you are infested with bugs. Yeah, that's the big,
the creepiest one. As you literally they all talk about
burrowing sensation and they all say bugs, like something is
(06:51):
under my skin and it's moving exactly. A lot of
them report feeling like a certain kind of grittiness under
their skin and um, often on the underside of their eyelids.
And a lot of people who have Morgellons say that's
those are eggs. They have um all sorts of sores
that itch like crazy, that um from which fibers are
(07:15):
pitted or come up from or whatever. Yeah. Um, those
fibers can be anywhere on the skin. And the weird
thing is they can pop up in places that people
can't reach with their arms. Right, and you're gonna start
itching during this podcast? We apologize. Were you itching when
you were reading this stuff? No, I was surprised. I wasn't, man,
I was itching like crazy. It occurred to me. Have
(07:38):
we ever done one on itching? I feel like we have,
because when I read some of that stuff will get
too later from that that one researcher, it felt really familiar.
It did to me too, But I looked it up
and there's nothing. There's no podcast in our archive on it.
I know we've done something because I remember specifically talking
about its being a dull they all pain right spoilers, Okay,
(08:05):
that comes later. So Um, like I said, those fibers
can appear anywhere on the body, and um sometimes they
move too. So if you're a Morgalon suffer, you're you're
pretty much convinced that you are infested with some sort
of weird bug, some kind of parasite. Maybe that's that's
inhabiting your skin with laying eggs, and um, you have
(08:27):
a basically a compulsion and obsession, is how it's described
by a lot of Morgalon sufferers to get these things
out of your skin wherever they are. There's one person
there's this awesome article called The Itch Nobody Can Scratch
by will Store, highly recommended. Yeah, it's it's a long
form article and it's worth every minute you spend on it.
(08:49):
Um And uh it was it's on medium dot com,
I think is where we found it. And uh, there's
one one Morgalon suffer who's interviewed in there who's talking
about um, noticing a fiber, feeling it on their eyeball
and then looking in the mirror the magnifying glass because
he's are thought to be very tiny bugs and um
(09:12):
seeing this little fiber moving across the prison's eyeball, So
they took a pair of tweezers to their eyeball to
get this thing out. This is the kind of suffering
that these people are going through. Yeah, this other lady
uh soaked her body in baths of bleach. Um. People
like we'll get turned away from doctors, are told they're crazy,
(09:34):
to the point where they contemplate or commit suicide because
it's so maddening and the itching is so maddening, and
to not be taken seriously, it's so maddening to be
told it's a psychiatric condition. Uh. But in two thousand eight, UM,
after thousands and thousands of people wrote into Congress, people
like John McCain and Hillary Clinton and at the time Obama,
(09:58):
they urged the CDC to do a study d and
uh we will tell you the results of that study
right after this message break. Okay, So there is a
disease or is it a disease very mysterious in origin.
No one takes the sufferers seriously or not. No one
but the medical community at large doesn't take them seriously.
(10:18):
And we'll talk about why. But one reason why is
because of the findings of the c d C, which
said that there was no singer, a single underlying medical
condition or infectious source that was identified. Most sores appeared
to be the result of chronic scratching and picking without
a cause. Materials and fibers obtained from skin biopsy specimens
(10:39):
were mostly cellulose compatible with cotton fibers um. A substantial
number of the participants in the study scored highly in
screening tests for one or more coexisting psychiatric or addictive conditions,
including depression, somatic concerns, which is an indicator preoccupation with
health issues, and drug use. Apparently, of the participants in
(11:02):
the study tested positive for drugs, they demonstrated no infectious cause,
no evidence of environmental link, no indication that would be
helpful to perform additional testing as potential causes, and future
efforts should focus on helping patients reduce their symptoms. So
there you have it. The CDC loudly said, these are
(11:23):
people that are just scratching themselves too much and becoming
obsessed with that. Yes, and with that CDC study, the
door kind of closed, at least for the time being,
on any help from the medical establishment. Yeah, so let's recap.
If you have more glance disease, you have welts all
over your body, from which there seemed to be fibers
(11:46):
of possibly an unknown origin sprouting. Um. You constantly itch,
so you're constantly scratching. So those those welts are getting
worse and worse and worse. Um, you feel like stinging sensations.
A lot of people compare them to being stuck with
compass needles all over your body. Um, And when you
(12:12):
go to your doctor, they tell you that you're wrong,
that stop scratching yourself. This is all in your head.
One of the very few academic papers that wasn't written
by a member of a Morglon's research organization said this
is most likely all in their head. And what you
(12:34):
should do if you're a physician and somebody comes to
you with what they think is Morgalon's disease, is that
you should give them a anti parasitic ointment just to
basically get them to trust you, and then prescribe antipsychotics.
Because what the medical establishment, and especially now that the
(12:55):
CDC study came in, believe is that this is something
called delusional paracitosis. Yeah, the belief that you have bugs
living in your skin, that everyone who has morgal one
disease is crazy. That's what the medical establishment thinks. Yeah,
but they don't say things like crazy. No, they don't know,
but they're they're saying like, you are delusional, you have
(13:17):
a false belief that you have bugs on your skin.
But the thing is, if you look at morgal and suffers,
there's people from all different walks of life. Yeah, this
is the I mean, the initial kid was a two
year old Oakland A's baseball picture, Billy Cooke. He left
the game because, well for a lot of reasons, but
(13:38):
this was one of them, because he suffered Joni Mitchell, Yeah,
you ever heard of her, famous singer, She suffers from
it um. In this will store article, there's a guy
named Paul who's a successful, seeming middle manager type from Texas,
and all these people, there's a doctor, a general practitioner
who has it. Should talk about him. All of these
(14:01):
people are are reporting similar symptoms. So the idea is,
if it's all delusional parasitosis, how is it possible that
all these people think they have the same thing. Well,
one answer that they think might be the case is
the internet because people start itching and they think what
(14:22):
in the world is going on with the sore? And
they look on the internet and they find more Gallant's disease,
and then they self diagnose. All this came about in
two thousand two. Is that a coincidence? I don't know,
but I know that self diagnosis is a problem. Um.
And I still don't know what to think about this.
When you read these stories, you feel awful for these people. Um.
(14:43):
That's the science can usually crack the code at some
point though everyone is saying there these people. No one
is saying that they're not suffering. Like, these people are
very much suffering. But the medical establishment is saying, it's
all in your head. We have a name for it.
It's called delusional parasitosis. Um. The people who have mor
(15:04):
Galiss disease are saying, like, no, this isn't in my head.
I've got fibers, like some of them have trapped bugs supposedly,
like they're they're saying, you guys aren't listening to me.
You can give me anti psychotics all you want, but
it's not gonna cure it. Yeah, And it's it's that
also that you fall into the trap. I read The
psychopath Test by John Ronson um fantastic book, by the way,
(15:28):
but there's a guy in there that tried to get
out of a jail sentence for an assault by pretending
he was crazy, got sent up to the worst middle
institution in England, and it was like, I'll be able
to get out of here in no time. The more
saying he appeared to try to be, the more crazy
they thought he was. And that's the same thing that
goes on with a lot of morgell And sufferers is
(15:51):
the more rationally we tried to talk about this, the
more they were like, Okay, let's just take it easy
and we'll get to the bottom of this. And it's uh.
And they point out, I think the uh author of
the thing you recommended was called the chicken and egg thing,
like it makes them spin out of control and depressed
in suicidal and and nuts. So but is that you
(16:14):
know which came first? Exactly? So are you suffering from
um these psychotic symptoms right or um mentally imbalanced symptoms
because as yeah, and from not being listened to or
are you you know, are you suffering this these these
(16:34):
physical symptoms because you're out of it a little bit. Yeah,
and it is a chicken or the egg kind of question.
But um, the idea of the fibers, that one is
a big one that a lot of people with morbilon
suffers point to. They're like, well, wait a minute. People
have found that these fibers can't be explained by anybody.
(16:55):
So is that the case? Well, Uh, your buddy Randy Wymore, Um,
he's really taking the mantle here, like I really like
this guy has done this. Uh. He the first time,
like we said, he went to the police department and
they found no known match in the database and couldn't
figure out what it was. Later on he asked for
um uh samples from sufferers and had them send them
(17:19):
to him. He took those in and uh, it was
pretty disappointed by the results when he sent them to
a lab to identify because they found that they were
somewhere cotton, somewhere nylon. Um. He said, it was pretty disappointing.
One was a fungal residue, When was a human hair,
When was a rodent hair, One was a goose down. Uh.
(17:43):
And so the author, you know, the author of this
paper was saying, were you disappointing. He said, well, yeah,
sure I was. But there were um some there was
one that was unknown and he said, so it was unknown.
He said, well, they said it was a big fungal fiber,
but they weren't completely sure, so he was kind of
debunked a little bit. So it's weird. It's like, sometimes
(18:03):
these fibers are real things, and sometimes it seem like
they're not right. So and with the fibers, it's um
there's a definite belief among the medical establishment that these
are just ordinary, everyday fibers. And if you start paying
attention to any spot on your body right, you're probably
going to be able to find a fiber. And if
(18:24):
that suddenly has some sort of significance to you and
you fixate on that, then you can easily fall down
this mental rabbit hole that Morgalon suffers. Supposedly are are
under the influence of Yeah, and and here's a tip,
and this is something I didn't know about. If you
have anything on your body that you pick off your
body or any just strange skin thing, and you put
(18:46):
it in a zip block back, take it to your doctor,
that's a sign to them. And I've never heard this,
but it's called the matchbox sign, and it's been they've
been calling it this since the nineteen thirties. And apparently
doctors when they see you bring anything and say, hey,
what's this weird thing? They go, okay, here's another another
crazy person, right, so you you it's a huge catch
(19:07):
twenty two because Morgalon suffers. One of the symptoms of
this disease are things that come off your body, whether
it's some sort of colored fiber or um little black
specs that's that fall off on mass from the body.
I forgot about those. They come off your body. And
if you're a Morgalon stuffer, well you think, like, I
need to show this to my doctor. Is evidence, But
(19:29):
in doing so, as far as the medical establishment is concerned,
you are immediately prima facie proving yourself to be mentally imbalanced,
and that's your problem. All you're doing by bringing this
evidence is supporting this diagnosis of delusional parasitology or parasitism. Yeah,
(19:50):
and that's there there go to. Yeah, if you bring
it in in a little matchbox or's a bluck bag,
they're thinking, all right, here we go. This person thinks
they have bugs under their skin. Exactly. So I'm gonna
give a little anti parasitic lotion that may or may
not really do anything in real life, could be a placebo.
And then after they trust me, I'm gonna recommend they
try some antipsychotics. So there are a couple of more
(20:13):
people we should talk about here, Um, a couple of
doctors actually that have some more interesting findings that will
get too right after this break, Josh, Yeah, let's chat
about square space, my friend. Okay, Because if you need
a website and you don't have one, there's really no
easier way to do so, no, I mean, the whole
(20:35):
thing is Dragon Drop is very intuitive. There's no need
to learn how to use code. And in case you
find yourself in a bit of a pickle, maybe even
a bind, they have seven customer support so you can
live chat with them twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. Yeah, all that stuff is great. But
what I love about it is it's beautiful. The designs
(20:55):
are great. It's gonna look clean, it's gonna look professional.
Everyone's gonna be tricked into thinking you're like a master
code or web designer. Yeah, and if you want to
sell stuff and make some money's all plans have commerce options,
from hosting an entire store to accepting donations for your
personal blog. Plus Chuck, you can get the whole thing
(21:15):
risk free. Now, wow, that sounds pretty great. Risk free
on your laptop, on your mobile device. It's gonna look
great on your tablet. That sounds like an all in
one solution to me. That's right. Like I said, risk free.
You can try squarespace if you go to squarespace dot
com slash stuff for your fourteen day trial with no
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(21:36):
as low as eight dollars a month and includes a
free domain name if you sign up for a year.
That's right, So just use our offera code stuff to
get that ten percent off your first purchase. All right,
let's talk about Dr and Louise Oaklander because the author
I keep calling the author who was at the road
(21:57):
and again Will Store, Yeah, Will Store got into with
this um professor at Harvard Medical School and she is
an itch specialist, a neurologist, and he thought, you know,
she would quickly dismiss him, but she was actually had
heard of it and was into it. And um, what
she thinks is that it's a chronic itch disorder that
(22:18):
isn't being taken seriously. Yeah, she feels like the medical
establishment is mistreating Morgalon sufferers by just completely discounting them
is all crazy, rather than doing any real investigation. Yeah,
I'm sure he was stoked to meet her at least,
and that's the case. Also, I should say the general
view of the CDC investigation that it was just basically
(22:38):
them going through the motions, or at at worst they
were looking for evidence to back up their own ideas
that it was delusional parasiteis m Yeah, sufferers I think
said the study was jump going in, so what is it?
Garbage going in, garbage comes out, So they didn't take
much stock in it. Um. But what we were talking
(22:59):
about earlier in nine eighty seven, a team of researchers
in Germany found the itch wasn't what we all thought
it was, which was a weak form of pain um
And they said that an itch has its own, separate,
dedicated network of nerves, and she thinks that if your brain,
you know, she likens it to like a mosquito lands
on your skin and you can't you can feel it,
(23:20):
you don't realize you're feeling it. But your your brain
picks up on it, so you go to itch it
or slap at it. And she thinks that that's why
we evolve to itch um, is to prevent insects from
landing on us, and that that's all this is. Your
brain doesn't differentiate. If you think there's a bug, then
your brain thinks there's a bug, whether it is or not. Right.
So her idea is that it's an itch disorder where
(23:42):
there's not a bug, but your brain is getting those
signals and it's driving you crazy. Um and that this
isn't being investigated and as a result, there's tens of thousands,
if not more, people out there suffering, being treated like
they're crazy and being offered absolutely no relief whatsoever from medicine.
And then the doctor was the one that really blew
(24:04):
me away. He got the end of the article. The
doctor from the UK, the general practitioner. Yeah, his name
is doctor nick Mann. And uh, he didn't even know
he was an author when he got in touch with
doctor Man. Yeah, he just thought he was just a
regular morgel and sufferer. And he described his experience that
(24:24):
his legs started itching after a walk. He was convinced
something was on him. Um, it got really out of hand,
and he eventually stripped down naked in his kitchen and
tried to dig one out, and he said, I stood
there for three or four hours waiting for one to bite.
As soon as it did, I went for it with
a hypodermic needle. His wife came in saw him all bloody,
bleeding from the scrotum in other places, his nipple, and
(24:46):
was horrified, obviously, and got three of these things into
a glass jar and said, look at these, look at these,
And she couldn't see anything. She thought he'd just gone
completely off his rocker. Yeah, but he did actually send
these in eventually to the UH to a hospital they
couldn't identify it, and then to the Natural History Museum,
(25:08):
and within one day they identified it as a tropical
rat MTE. And so I thought, hey, well that's the answer.
Then these are tropical rat mtes. But I think his
his was the only case, because I tried to look
up more evidence of that than it didn't really find
anything besides him. So is that unrelated? Do you think?
Is he just had a mite? I don't know. There
(25:29):
are no answers to this. That's why I'm frustrated, And
the big problem is that there's nobody really investigating it.
There's like a handful of rag tag people who are
investigating it, and the problem is that they're running into
the structure of medicine and science, the scientific establishment, the
(25:49):
establishments of both of these things, and where they cross
and form this ven diagram. This is what these people
are running up against. So it's like, if you're going
to produce a legitimate academic paper on this thing, and
you managed to get it published, and you managed to
get another one published, and then another one, and you're
a real researcher, but you're the only person producing academic
(26:12):
papers on Morgellons, well you just look like a crackpot
who has access to a couple of academic journals and
can get something published because you're the only one who's
who's writing about that, and anybody else who is who's
ever even paid any attention to it, has just dismissed
it as delusions of parasitosis. Right. Plus, you're not gonna
get any funding. You're not. Well, you can, there's a
(26:33):
few research um organizations that do fund that kind of stuff,
but even still, it's in the eyes of the normal establishment.
You're you're not going to be treated very seriously, so
you're you're running into that. And then you know, one
science is made up. It's mind. Apparently nobody's gonna look
into it, and so there's no treatment for it whatsoever,
(26:54):
because it's been determined these people are delusional and that's that.
So why would we spend any more time looking into it? Well,
why more even had a problem. I remember at one
point getting labs to look at these fibers. Once they
found out for this disease, they were like, oh no, no, no,
we're not going to touch that, right, So I guess
(27:15):
that would even if that's always the reputation of a lab,
even like no one wants to touch this thing, right,
And then a lot of Morgalon suffers aren't helping their
case by just kind of supposing what could be the
problem mites and bugs, since it feels like bugs are
an obvious answer, and that itch researcher says, that's just
totally sensible. If you have an itch disorder and your
(27:36):
nerves are going, hey, whire, and it feels like bugs,
why wouldn't you think it was small, tiny, invisible bugs.
It makes sense. But then there's been other ideas proposed
to like it's nanotechnology or genetically modified organisms that have
run them buck and it's part of a government cover up. Yes,
then these things are um like, these suggestions are not
(27:56):
helping the case in the public eye or in the
eye of of the academic or scientific establishment that these
people are um mentally healthy. Yeah, it's been linked to
kim trails. Okay, so and you're not going to get
very far. But the thing is is if these people
really do have something, whether it's an inch disorder, whether
it's a bug that's not whatever it is, or if
(28:23):
it's delusions of parasitosis. Either way they're still suffering. Yeah
they still need help, yes, so, but no one's giving
it to them. Well, they are in the form of
psychiatric treatment, but that's not good enough for a lot
of these people because they say I don't need psychiatric
treatment because I have a physical issue. Ah. The complaint
(28:47):
is is they think I'm crazy and I'm not crazy.
It's sad. It is sad. I want to follow up
on this, I bet you. I mean, I'm sure they're
things what bothers me about sciences. They may not think
that they could discover some new It's just so easily dismissed.
It just kind of bugs me, it bugs you. But
I mean there are some you in sciences defense or
(29:10):
medicine's defense, there are there's some evidence that it is
fictitious or delusion, like supposedly. Uh. And in this will
store article, there's one guy who's like his welts were
healing up, and the author asked him, you know what,
what did you do that's different that's making your wealthy.
Lo's like, I just stopped itching. I just stopped scratching,
(29:31):
and that makes every doctor in the role go, see there, exactly,
stop scratching, You're gonna stop getting the welts because the
welts are produced by itching. But then there's the other side.
It's like, well what about the welts there are on
parts of the body where it's like I can't reach.
How do you explain that? So I guess, yeah, we
need to revisit it, Like you say, yeah, I would
(29:52):
love to if we have a listener out there the
suffering from this, I would love to hear a firsthand
account of your experience. Yes, we won't judge you know
of it is not if you want to learn more
about Morgelon's disease. You can read that really awesome article
that it's Nobody can scratch. It's very compelling by Will Store.
(30:12):
I think it's on medium dot com. You can also
type in Morgelon's m O r G E L l
O n S in the search bar how stuffworks dot
com and will bring up another article as well. Since
I said search bar, it's time forward listener mail. I'm
gonna call this m p A A follow up. Hey guys,
I'm a newcomer and have been loving the episodes. I'm
(30:33):
also a PhD student in cinema and media studies. I
was excited to see you do the m p A episode.
You did a great job covering a lot of its
current controversies and explaining the common misconceptions about c A
r A. I just wanted to add a little bit
explanation to the X rating, which is such a strange
portion of the m p a's history. When the ratings
(30:54):
code was instituted, Jack Balini used an X rating for films,
but he never copy righted the X rating because he
did not want to encourage the rating or come off
as monopolistic. Midnight Cowboy, acclaimed for winning Best Picture as
an X rated film, actually self rated itself X and
began a marketing campaign to exemplify its status as unique
(31:16):
and artistic, fair for adults rather than pornography. UH. Soon
pornographic films also began self imposing the X rating, and
newspapers refused to advertise for X rated films. Theatrical porn
was booming. It's so weird to think about theatrical born
like going in the theater and watching that with people.
Very weird. UH. Films like Deep Throat placed in the
(31:38):
top ten of the year. While Hollywood pushed for legislation
against theatrical porn, they also distanced themselves from the rogue
X rating that they once controlled. The m p a
A quickly expanded the R rating and re rated films
to avoid it. Wes Craven even illegally quote unquote, I'm
sorry vote illegally end of quote, spliced in an R
(32:03):
rating banner from a different film into his nineteen seventy
three film The Last House on the Left because he
cannot get the m p a A to grant him
an R rating. It's a strange time and somewhat more
fluid since pig theater chains and multiplexes were not as
ubiquitous as they are today. Sadly, the n C seventeen
doesn't seem like much of an answer to the X
rating legacy, since its films only play two limited art
(32:25):
house audiences for the most part, You are right that
v O D poses hope though, Uh what's that video? Onto? Man?
If anyone is interested in this and more in the
n B A, this should check out John Lewis's Hollywood
The Hardcore. It's a fascinating read. Thanks again, guys, all
the best. That is Dan from u c l A.
(32:46):
Go Bruins. Nice Thanks a lot. That's some good info. Yeah, totally,
that's basically like a treatise on the history of the
X rating. Agreed, good going. Who was that Dan from
u c l AN. Thanks Dan and Go Bruins. Indeed. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us to
give us more information about something we've talked about, we
(33:07):
love that kind of stuff. You can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you should Know. You
can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com and check out our website. What's
your problem? Go to www. Dot stuff You should know
(33:27):
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it, How stuff works dot com
Welcome to you stuff you should know from how stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark and Charles W. Chuck, Bryan Jerry are with me.
So of course as this should know. I know that
is false, sir, because this is probably the most interesting,
(00:25):
weirdest podcast we've done in a long long time. I
thought it was. I was I had never heard of this.
You sent it my way. I was like, all right,
some some disease, Like, let's cover some disease. And then
I started started reading it and I was just like,
what the world mind going on? And I still don't
know what's going on. It's totally fascinating. Well you are
(00:48):
in the majority, Chuck about not knowing about it. Yeah, yeah,
it's a mysterious disease of some sort and there's a
great battle going on. But is it even a disease?
Very controversial, that's the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah, And we're
um and we're talking about it based on an article
from how stuff Works. Um, what we're talking about is
(01:10):
I say more gelons, Chuck and Martin Basher say more gelons.
I saw on some pronunciation site more jellons. But we're
both gonna make a hard g sound. How about that.
We can agree on the hard g okay um. But
what we're talking about is this disease that was basically discovered,
(01:32):
first described in two thousand two. Initially that will make
your radar go up, because that is super new. But
the name itself is borrowed from a seventeenth century obscure
French medical text Morgelons more gelons, however you want to pronounce.
It was first used to describe some weird condition where
(01:56):
coarse hair grew out of the backs of children. If
you go on to any Morglon's research site and research
the origin of the name, you will also usually see
right afterwards a sentence that says, that's not what this is.
It's just this lady used the same name the first
person to describe it. That's a good way to say that,
(02:19):
because her son had it. Yeah, the the lady in
questions name was Mary Liteo. That's how I'm pronouncing her name.
No hard g um. But she had a two year
old who at the time was saying uh, bugs and
pointing to his lip and um, he had some sort
of sores around his lips, and when she looked closely,
(02:41):
she saw that there was some strange threads or string
or some fibers coming out of these sores and his lips,
and she became alarmed. She did and uh, she, like
almost every sufferer from this odd is it a disease
or not, since then, has had a really hard time
(03:05):
getting diagnosis, getting doctors to take her seriously. Um, so
much so that she formed a support group h and
a website, the More Gellons Research Foundation, And uh, I
guess we just need to get into it. I mean,
it is one of the oddest things I've ever heard.
It's dermacological, it's about the skin. Um. There are sores,
(03:28):
there's a lot of itching, and that The most mysterious
thing about it, though, is like you said, these blue, red, black,
and I think white fibers And you can look up
more gallons if you type in more gallons fibers and
immin search that you're gonna see these things. And they
just look like little threads coming out of your skin
(03:51):
or burrowed beneath your skin. So the thing is chuck,
is you know, fibers associated with sores on somebody's body. Weird,
but not the most mysterious thing in the universe. The
problem is is there's a guy, a professor of pharmacology
at Oklahoma State University named Randy Wymore who took an
(04:15):
interest in morgalance Diseasey doesn't have it himself, but he
read about it and thought, well, all we all you
have to do is you know, look at these fibers. Yeah,
it's probably an ingrown hair or something. And with the
research carried out independently by UM Dr why Moore, the
weirdness the legend began to grow because it was first
(04:39):
identified in two tho two, when I think in two
thousand five he heard about it and started researching. So
he got in touch with um morgalon sufferers and said, hey,
send me some of these weird fibers and I want
to check him out. And apparently when he asked for
some assistance and identifying what the fibers were, he found
that not all of them could be conclusively identified. Yeah,
(05:02):
like not as Oh well I can't tell is it
some weird animal hair or is it a cotton fiber?
Is it nylon? They weren't able to identify them at all.
As a it did not exist in the FBI database.
It was not plant or animal um or or and
(05:23):
it didn't match any of the eighty thousand plus synthetic
fibers that are in in the FBI database. Yeah, so
it literally was um. I mean, he he brought one
even to a specialist who I think from a police
department that does this for a living, looked at under
microscope and he was like, I've never seen anything like
(05:44):
this in my life. So the the the mystery took
root at that point. Oh yeah, in a big way. Um.
And the problem is, though, is the more morgelons are
more Gelon sufferers. We have no idea how many there are,
because the medical establishment has concluded that there's no such thing. Yeah.
(06:09):
I mean this article is written in what like two
thousand ten, it said fourteen thousand confirmed. But um, if
you're not being diagnosed, or if you're told you might
be crazy, which we'll get to in a minute, Um,
then yeah, who knows how many people? And man, it's
just it gets more and more interesting, it does, so. Um.
(06:30):
In addition to fibers, there's all sorts of horrible symptoms
that Morgelon sufferers report. So first of all, you feel
like you are infested with bugs. Yeah, that's the big,
the creepiest one. As you literally they all talk about
burrowing sensation and they all say bugs, like something is
(06:51):
under my skin and it's moving exactly. A lot of
them report feeling like a certain kind of grittiness under
their skin and um, often on the underside of their eyelids.
And a lot of people who have Morgellons say that's
those are eggs. They have um all sorts of sores
that itch like crazy, that um from which fibers are
(07:15):
pitted or come up from or whatever. Yeah. Um, those
fibers can be anywhere on the skin. And the weird
thing is they can pop up in places that people
can't reach with their arms. Right, and you're gonna start
itching during this podcast? We apologize. Were you itching when
you were reading this stuff? No, I was surprised. I wasn't, man,
I was itching like crazy. It occurred to me. Have
(07:38):
we ever done one on itching? I feel like we have,
because when I read some of that stuff will get
too later from that that one researcher, it felt really familiar.
It did to me too, But I looked it up
and there's nothing. There's no podcast in our archive on it.
I know we've done something because I remember specifically talking
about its being a dull they all pain right spoilers, Okay,
(08:05):
that comes later. So Um, like I said, those fibers
can appear anywhere on the body, and um sometimes they
move too. So if you're a Morgalon suffer, you're you're
pretty much convinced that you are infested with some sort
of weird bug, some kind of parasite. Maybe that's that's
inhabiting your skin with laying eggs, and um, you have
(08:27):
a basically a compulsion and obsession, is how it's described
by a lot of Morgalon sufferers to get these things
out of your skin wherever they are. There's one person
there's this awesome article called The Itch Nobody Can Scratch
by will Store, highly recommended. Yeah, it's it's a long
form article and it's worth every minute you spend on it.
(08:49):
Um And uh it was it's on medium dot com,
I think is where we found it. And uh, there's
one one Morgalon suffer who's interviewed in there who's talking
about um, noticing a fiber, feeling it on their eyeball
and then looking in the mirror the magnifying glass because
he's are thought to be very tiny bugs and um
(09:12):
seeing this little fiber moving across the prison's eyeball, So
they took a pair of tweezers to their eyeball to
get this thing out. This is the kind of suffering
that these people are going through. Yeah, this other lady
uh soaked her body in baths of bleach. Um. People
like we'll get turned away from doctors, are told they're crazy,
(09:34):
to the point where they contemplate or commit suicide because
it's so maddening and the itching is so maddening, and
to not be taken seriously, it's so maddening to be
told it's a psychiatric condition. Uh. But in two thousand eight, UM,
after thousands and thousands of people wrote into Congress, people
like John McCain and Hillary Clinton and at the time Obama,
(09:58):
they urged the CDC to do a study d and
uh we will tell you the results of that study
right after this message break. Okay, So there is a
disease or is it a disease very mysterious in origin.
No one takes the sufferers seriously or not. No one
but the medical community at large doesn't take them seriously.
(10:18):
And we'll talk about why. But one reason why is
because of the findings of the c d C, which
said that there was no singer, a single underlying medical
condition or infectious source that was identified. Most sores appeared
to be the result of chronic scratching and picking without
a cause. Materials and fibers obtained from skin biopsy specimens
(10:39):
were mostly cellulose compatible with cotton fibers um. A substantial
number of the participants in the study scored highly in
screening tests for one or more coexisting psychiatric or addictive conditions,
including depression, somatic concerns, which is an indicator preoccupation with
health issues, and drug use. Apparently, of the participants in
(11:02):
the study tested positive for drugs, they demonstrated no infectious cause,
no evidence of environmental link, no indication that would be
helpful to perform additional testing as potential causes, and future
efforts should focus on helping patients reduce their symptoms. So
there you have it. The CDC loudly said, these are
(11:23):
people that are just scratching themselves too much and becoming
obsessed with that. Yes, and with that CDC study, the
door kind of closed, at least for the time being,
on any help from the medical establishment. Yeah, so let's recap.
If you have more glance disease, you have welts all
over your body, from which there seemed to be fibers
(11:46):
of possibly an unknown origin sprouting. Um. You constantly itch,
so you're constantly scratching. So those those welts are getting
worse and worse and worse. Um, you feel like stinging sensations.
A lot of people compare them to being stuck with
compass needles all over your body. Um, And when you
(12:12):
go to your doctor, they tell you that you're wrong,
that stop scratching yourself. This is all in your head.
One of the very few academic papers that wasn't written
by a member of a Morglon's research organization said this
is most likely all in their head. And what you
(12:34):
should do if you're a physician and somebody comes to
you with what they think is Morgalon's disease, is that
you should give them a anti parasitic ointment just to
basically get them to trust you, and then prescribe antipsychotics.
Because what the medical establishment, and especially now that the
(12:55):
CDC study came in, believe is that this is something
called delusional paracitosis. Yeah, the belief that you have bugs
living in your skin, that everyone who has morgal one
disease is crazy. That's what the medical establishment thinks. Yeah,
but they don't say things like crazy. No, they don't know,
but they're they're saying like, you are delusional, you have
(13:17):
a false belief that you have bugs on your skin.
But the thing is, if you look at morgal and suffers,
there's people from all different walks of life. Yeah, this
is the I mean, the initial kid was a two
year old Oakland A's baseball picture, Billy Cooke. He left
the game because, well for a lot of reasons, but
(13:38):
this was one of them, because he suffered Joni Mitchell, Yeah,
you ever heard of her, famous singer, She suffers from
it um. In this will store article, there's a guy
named Paul who's a successful, seeming middle manager type from Texas,
and all these people, there's a doctor, a general practitioner
who has it. Should talk about him. All of these
(14:01):
people are are reporting similar symptoms. So the idea is,
if it's all delusional parasitosis, how is it possible that
all these people think they have the same thing. Well,
one answer that they think might be the case is
the internet because people start itching and they think what
(14:22):
in the world is going on with the sore? And
they look on the internet and they find more Gallant's disease,
and then they self diagnose. All this came about in
two thousand two. Is that a coincidence? I don't know,
but I know that self diagnosis is a problem. Um.
And I still don't know what to think about this.
When you read these stories, you feel awful for these people. Um.
(14:43):
That's the science can usually crack the code at some
point though everyone is saying there these people. No one
is saying that they're not suffering. Like, these people are
very much suffering. But the medical establishment is saying, it's
all in your head. We have a name for it.
It's called delusional parasitosis. Um. The people who have mor
(15:04):
Galiss disease are saying, like, no, this isn't in my head.
I've got fibers, like some of them have trapped bugs supposedly,
like they're they're saying, you guys aren't listening to me.
You can give me anti psychotics all you want, but
it's not gonna cure it. Yeah, And it's it's that
also that you fall into the trap. I read The
psychopath Test by John Ronson um fantastic book, by the way,
(15:28):
but there's a guy in there that tried to get
out of a jail sentence for an assault by pretending
he was crazy, got sent up to the worst middle
institution in England, and it was like, I'll be able
to get out of here in no time. The more
saying he appeared to try to be, the more crazy
they thought he was. And that's the same thing that
goes on with a lot of morgell And sufferers is
(15:51):
the more rationally we tried to talk about this, the
more they were like, Okay, let's just take it easy
and we'll get to the bottom of this. And it's uh.
And they point out, I think the uh author of
the thing you recommended was called the chicken and egg thing,
like it makes them spin out of control and depressed
in suicidal and and nuts. So but is that you
(16:14):
know which came first? Exactly? So are you suffering from
um these psychotic symptoms right or um mentally imbalanced symptoms
because as yeah, and from not being listened to or
are you you know, are you suffering this these these
(16:34):
physical symptoms because you're out of it a little bit. Yeah,
and it is a chicken or the egg kind of question.
But um, the idea of the fibers, that one is
a big one that a lot of people with morbilon
suffers point to. They're like, well, wait a minute. People
have found that these fibers can't be explained by anybody.
(16:55):
So is that the case? Well, Uh, your buddy Randy Wymore, Um,
he's really taking the mantle here, like I really like
this guy has done this. Uh. He the first time,
like we said, he went to the police department and
they found no known match in the database and couldn't
figure out what it was. Later on he asked for
um uh samples from sufferers and had them send them
(17:19):
to him. He took those in and uh, it was
pretty disappointed by the results when he sent them to
a lab to identify because they found that they were
somewhere cotton, somewhere nylon. Um. He said, it was pretty disappointing.
One was a fungal residue, When was a human hair,
When was a rodent hair, One was a goose down. Uh.
(17:43):
And so the author, you know, the author of this
paper was saying, were you disappointing. He said, well, yeah,
sure I was. But there were um some there was
one that was unknown and he said, so it was unknown.
He said, well, they said it was a big fungal fiber,
but they weren't completely sure, so he was kind of
debunked a little bit. So it's weird. It's like, sometimes
(18:03):
these fibers are real things, and sometimes it seem like
they're not right. So and with the fibers, it's um
there's a definite belief among the medical establishment that these
are just ordinary, everyday fibers. And if you start paying
attention to any spot on your body right, you're probably
going to be able to find a fiber. And if
(18:24):
that suddenly has some sort of significance to you and
you fixate on that, then you can easily fall down
this mental rabbit hole that Morgalon suffers. Supposedly are are
under the influence of Yeah, and and here's a tip,
and this is something I didn't know about. If you
have anything on your body that you pick off your
body or any just strange skin thing, and you put
(18:46):
it in a zip block back, take it to your doctor,
that's a sign to them. And I've never heard this,
but it's called the matchbox sign, and it's been they've
been calling it this since the nineteen thirties. And apparently
doctors when they see you bring anything and say, hey,
what's this weird thing? They go, okay, here's another another
crazy person, right, so you you it's a huge catch
(19:07):
twenty two because Morgalon suffers. One of the symptoms of
this disease are things that come off your body, whether
it's some sort of colored fiber or um little black
specs that's that fall off on mass from the body.
I forgot about those. They come off your body. And
if you're a Morgalon stuffer, well you think, like, I
need to show this to my doctor. Is evidence, But
(19:29):
in doing so, as far as the medical establishment is concerned,
you are immediately prima facie proving yourself to be mentally imbalanced,
and that's your problem. All you're doing by bringing this
evidence is supporting this diagnosis of delusional parasitology or parasitism. Yeah,
(19:50):
and that's there there go to. Yeah, if you bring
it in in a little matchbox or's a bluck bag,
they're thinking, all right, here we go. This person thinks
they have bugs under their skin. Exactly. So I'm gonna
give a little anti parasitic lotion that may or may
not really do anything in real life, could be a placebo.
And then after they trust me, I'm gonna recommend they
try some antipsychotics. So there are a couple of more
(20:13):
people we should talk about here, Um, a couple of
doctors actually that have some more interesting findings that will
get too right after this break, Josh, Yeah, let's chat
about square space, my friend. Okay, Because if you need
a website and you don't have one, there's really no
easier way to do so, no, I mean, the whole
(20:35):
thing is Dragon Drop is very intuitive. There's no need
to learn how to use code. And in case you
find yourself in a bit of a pickle, maybe even
a bind, they have seven customer support so you can
live chat with them twenty four hours a day, seven
days a week. Yeah, all that stuff is great. But
what I love about it is it's beautiful. The designs
(20:55):
are great. It's gonna look clean, it's gonna look professional.
Everyone's gonna be tricked into thinking you're like a master
code or web designer. Yeah, and if you want to
sell stuff and make some money's all plans have commerce options,
from hosting an entire store to accepting donations for your
personal blog. Plus Chuck, you can get the whole thing
(21:15):
risk free. Now, wow, that sounds pretty great. Risk free
on your laptop, on your mobile device. It's gonna look
great on your tablet. That sounds like an all in
one solution to me. That's right. Like I said, risk free.
You can try squarespace if you go to squarespace dot
com slash stuff for your fourteen day trial with no
credit card necessary. If you like the product, it costs
(21:36):
as low as eight dollars a month and includes a
free domain name if you sign up for a year.
That's right, So just use our offera code stuff to
get that ten percent off your first purchase. All right,
let's talk about Dr and Louise Oaklander because the author
I keep calling the author who was at the road
(21:57):
and again Will Store, Yeah, Will Store got into with
this um professor at Harvard Medical School and she is
an itch specialist, a neurologist, and he thought, you know,
she would quickly dismiss him, but she was actually had
heard of it and was into it. And um, what
she thinks is that it's a chronic itch disorder that
(22:18):
isn't being taken seriously. Yeah, she feels like the medical
establishment is mistreating Morgalon sufferers by just completely discounting them
is all crazy, rather than doing any real investigation. Yeah,
I'm sure he was stoked to meet her at least,
and that's the case. Also, I should say the general
view of the CDC investigation that it was just basically
(22:38):
them going through the motions, or at at worst they
were looking for evidence to back up their own ideas
that it was delusional parasiteis m Yeah, sufferers I think
said the study was jump going in, so what is it?
Garbage going in, garbage comes out, So they didn't take
much stock in it. Um. But what we were talking
(22:59):
about earlier in nine eighty seven, a team of researchers
in Germany found the itch wasn't what we all thought
it was, which was a weak form of pain um
And they said that an itch has its own, separate,
dedicated network of nerves, and she thinks that if your brain,
you know, she likens it to like a mosquito lands
on your skin and you can't you can feel it,
(23:20):
you don't realize you're feeling it. But your your brain
picks up on it, so you go to itch it
or slap at it. And she thinks that that's why
we evolve to itch um, is to prevent insects from
landing on us, and that that's all this is. Your
brain doesn't differentiate. If you think there's a bug, then
your brain thinks there's a bug, whether it is or not. Right.
So her idea is that it's an itch disorder where
(23:42):
there's not a bug, but your brain is getting those
signals and it's driving you crazy. Um and that this
isn't being investigated and as a result, there's tens of thousands,
if not more, people out there suffering, being treated like
they're crazy and being offered absolutely no relief whatsoever from medicine.
And then the doctor was the one that really blew
(24:04):
me away. He got the end of the article. The
doctor from the UK, the general practitioner. Yeah, his name
is doctor nick Mann. And uh, he didn't even know
he was an author when he got in touch with
doctor Man. Yeah, he just thought he was just a
regular morgel and sufferer. And he described his experience that
(24:24):
his legs started itching after a walk. He was convinced
something was on him. Um, it got really out of hand,
and he eventually stripped down naked in his kitchen and
tried to dig one out, and he said, I stood
there for three or four hours waiting for one to bite.
As soon as it did, I went for it with
a hypodermic needle. His wife came in saw him all bloody,
bleeding from the scrotum in other places, his nipple, and
(24:46):
was horrified, obviously, and got three of these things into
a glass jar and said, look at these, look at these,
And she couldn't see anything. She thought he'd just gone
completely off his rocker. Yeah, but he did actually send
these in eventually to the UH to a hospital they
couldn't identify it, and then to the Natural History Museum,
(25:08):
and within one day they identified it as a tropical
rat MTE. And so I thought, hey, well that's the answer.
Then these are tropical rat mtes. But I think his
his was the only case, because I tried to look
up more evidence of that than it didn't really find
anything besides him. So is that unrelated? Do you think?
Is he just had a mite? I don't know. There
(25:29):
are no answers to this. That's why I'm frustrated, And
the big problem is that there's nobody really investigating it.
There's like a handful of rag tag people who are
investigating it, and the problem is that they're running into
the structure of medicine and science, the scientific establishment, the
(25:49):
establishments of both of these things, and where they cross
and form this ven diagram. This is what these people
are running up against. So it's like, if you're going
to produce a legitimate academic paper on this thing, and
you managed to get it published, and you managed to
get another one published, and then another one, and you're
a real researcher, but you're the only person producing academic
(26:12):
papers on Morgellons, well you just look like a crackpot
who has access to a couple of academic journals and
can get something published because you're the only one who's
who's writing about that, and anybody else who is who's
ever even paid any attention to it, has just dismissed
it as delusions of parasitosis. Right. Plus, you're not gonna
get any funding. You're not. Well, you can, there's a
(26:33):
few research um organizations that do fund that kind of stuff,
but even still, it's in the eyes of the normal establishment.
You're you're not going to be treated very seriously, so
you're you're running into that. And then you know, one
science is made up. It's mind. Apparently nobody's gonna look
into it, and so there's no treatment for it whatsoever,
(26:54):
because it's been determined these people are delusional and that's that.
So why would we spend any more time looking into it? Well,
why more even had a problem. I remember at one
point getting labs to look at these fibers. Once they
found out for this disease, they were like, oh no, no, no,
we're not going to touch that, right, So I guess
(27:15):
that would even if that's always the reputation of a lab,
even like no one wants to touch this thing, right,
And then a lot of Morgalon suffers aren't helping their
case by just kind of supposing what could be the
problem mites and bugs, since it feels like bugs are
an obvious answer, and that itch researcher says, that's just
totally sensible. If you have an itch disorder and your
(27:36):
nerves are going, hey, whire, and it feels like bugs,
why wouldn't you think it was small, tiny, invisible bugs.
It makes sense. But then there's been other ideas proposed
to like it's nanotechnology or genetically modified organisms that have
run them buck and it's part of a government cover up. Yes,
then these things are um like, these suggestions are not
(27:56):
helping the case in the public eye or in the
eye of of the academic or scientific establishment that these
people are um mentally healthy. Yeah, it's been linked to
kim trails. Okay, so and you're not going to get
very far. But the thing is is if these people
really do have something, whether it's an inch disorder, whether
it's a bug that's not whatever it is, or if
(28:23):
it's delusions of parasitosis. Either way they're still suffering. Yeah
they still need help, yes, so, but no one's giving
it to them. Well, they are in the form of
psychiatric treatment, but that's not good enough for a lot
of these people because they say I don't need psychiatric
treatment because I have a physical issue. Ah. The complaint
(28:47):
is is they think I'm crazy and I'm not crazy.
It's sad. It is sad. I want to follow up
on this, I bet you. I mean, I'm sure they're
things what bothers me about sciences. They may not think
that they could discover some new It's just so easily dismissed.
It just kind of bugs me, it bugs you. But
I mean there are some you in sciences defense or
(29:10):
medicine's defense, there are there's some evidence that it is
fictitious or delusion, like supposedly. Uh. And in this will
store article, there's one guy who's like his welts were
healing up, and the author asked him, you know what,
what did you do that's different that's making your wealthy.
Lo's like, I just stopped itching. I just stopped scratching,
(29:31):
and that makes every doctor in the role go, see there, exactly,
stop scratching, You're gonna stop getting the welts because the
welts are produced by itching. But then there's the other side.
It's like, well what about the welts there are on
parts of the body where it's like I can't reach.
How do you explain that? So I guess, yeah, we
need to revisit it, Like you say, yeah, I would
(29:52):
love to if we have a listener out there the
suffering from this, I would love to hear a firsthand
account of your experience. Yes, we won't judge you know
of it is not if you want to learn more
about Morgelon's disease. You can read that really awesome article
that it's Nobody can scratch. It's very compelling by Will Store.
(30:12):
I think it's on medium dot com. You can also
type in Morgelon's m O r G E L l
O n S in the search bar how stuffworks dot
com and will bring up another article as well. Since
I said search bar, it's time forward listener mail. I'm
gonna call this m p A A follow up. Hey guys,
I'm a newcomer and have been loving the episodes. I'm
(30:33):
also a PhD student in cinema and media studies. I
was excited to see you do the m p A episode.
You did a great job covering a lot of its
current controversies and explaining the common misconceptions about c A
r A. I just wanted to add a little bit
explanation to the X rating, which is such a strange
portion of the m p a's history. When the ratings
(30:54):
code was instituted, Jack Balini used an X rating for films,
but he never copy righted the X rating because he
did not want to encourage the rating or come off
as monopolistic. Midnight Cowboy, acclaimed for winning Best Picture as
an X rated film, actually self rated itself X and
began a marketing campaign to exemplify its status as unique
(31:16):
and artistic, fair for adults rather than pornography. UH. Soon
pornographic films also began self imposing the X rating, and
newspapers refused to advertise for X rated films. Theatrical porn
was booming. It's so weird to think about theatrical born
like going in the theater and watching that with people.
Very weird. UH. Films like Deep Throat placed in the
(31:38):
top ten of the year. While Hollywood pushed for legislation
against theatrical porn, they also distanced themselves from the rogue
X rating that they once controlled. The m p a
A quickly expanded the R rating and re rated films
to avoid it. Wes Craven even illegally quote unquote, I'm
sorry vote illegally end of quote, spliced in an R
(32:03):
rating banner from a different film into his nineteen seventy
three film The Last House on the Left because he
cannot get the m p a A to grant him
an R rating. It's a strange time and somewhat more
fluid since pig theater chains and multiplexes were not as
ubiquitous as they are today. Sadly, the n C seventeen
doesn't seem like much of an answer to the X
rating legacy, since its films only play two limited art
(32:25):
house audiences for the most part, You are right that
v O D poses hope though, Uh what's that video? Onto? Man?
If anyone is interested in this and more in the
n B A, this should check out John Lewis's Hollywood
The Hardcore. It's a fascinating read. Thanks again, guys, all
the best. That is Dan from u c l A.
(32:46):
Go Bruins. Nice Thanks a lot. That's some good info. Yeah, totally,
that's basically like a treatise on the history of the
X rating. Agreed, good going. Who was that Dan from
u c l AN. Thanks Dan and Go Bruins. Indeed. Uh.
If you want to get in touch with us to
give us more information about something we've talked about, we
(33:07):
love that kind of stuff. You can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you should Know. You
can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how
Stuff Works dot com and check out our website. What's
your problem? Go to www. Dot stuff You should know
(33:27):
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it, How stuff works dot com
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