Sex is chock-full of health benefits like stress relief and incontinence prevention, but even small missteps can result in serious injury.
In addition to commonly cited sex injuries like broken penises and falls in the shower, a handful of more obscure sex accidents have occurred and prove sex can be, well, complicated.
From spicy food that burned a woman's genitals to a wedding ring caught on a man's penis, these are some of the weirdest sex injuries in history and the medical explanations behind them.
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Spicy food lovers, beware: eating flavorful foods like hot peppers could result in unwanted pain during sex.
That was the case for one woman, who reported a burning sensation in her genital area after she received oral sex.
"The hot sauce her partner consumed prior to the sex act left mild burns on her genital region," Dr. Gabe Wilson, an emergency physician, told Men's Health of his patient.
In addition to spicy foods feeling hot on the tongue's taste buds, they can also interact with skin receptors that process pain from things like extreme temperatures, pinching, cutting, and chemicals.
When something like a chili pepper touches then skin, the receptors process it as a chemical reaction that creates a painful sensation. Add the fact that the vulva is made from some of the most sensitive skin on the body, and a hot food reaction can be a recipe for disaster.
"He had erectile dysfunction, and was having difficulty maintaining an erection so he did some poking around online, and read about putting a ring on his penis to help," Dr. Robert J. Hartman Jr. told Men's Health.
Special rings designed for the penis exist, but this man decided to use his wedding ring to test out the online suggestion and it ended up getting stuck since it's made from metal rather than a more forgiving material that could slide off the penis once it's erect.
Dr. Hartman said the wedding ring stopped blood flow out of his penis, causing it to become swollen and "borderline necrotic," but his team was able to eventually remove the ring using a diamond-tip saw blade.
The woman also had trouble breathing, and when doctors investigated, they discovered she had an allergy to the antibiotic penicillin. Her partner had traces of a similar antibiotic, amoxicillin, in his semen, according to BMJ Case Reports.
He had been taking amoxicillin to treat an ear infection.
Allergens transferred through sex have barely been studied, and this case is one of the first that demonstrates the phenomenon.
Another study, published in 2007 in The Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology, involved a woman who also had an allergic reaction after swallowing her partner's semen. She was allergic to Brazil nuts, and doctors found traces of them in his semen after he ate some earlier that day.
