26-Year-Old Man Suffers Stroke After Getting Neck Massage - Oddity Central

[mnews]

A 26-year-old Chinese programmer who got a vigorous neck massage to relieve pain narrowly avoided permanent paralysis after suffering a stroke.

Xiao Zhang (pseudonym), a young IT professional from Changsha, China’s Hunan Province, often suffered from neck pain due to spending many hours at his desk. After learning that traditional massage could help relieve neck pain, he decided to try it out at a local massage parlor. Everything was going great until he felt a sharp pain in his neck during a more vigorous maneuver by the massage therapist, which was shortly followed by a strong headache. He didn’t think too much of these symptoms, but the very next morning, he woke up with numbness and weakness of the left side of his body, as well as slurred speech. Scared, the 26-year-old rushed to the Second People’s Hospital of Hunan Province, where he was diagnosed with a secondary cerebral infarction.

Photo: Toa Heftiba/Unsplash

A head magnetic resonance imaging and cerebral angiography showed that Xiao Zhang had suffered a “right carotid artery dissection and secondary cerebral infarction.” Luckily for the young patient, he arrived at the hospital soon enough to prevent permanent damage. Employing comprehensive treatments such as anticoagulation therapy, improvement of collateral circulation, and the clearing of oxygen free radicals, doctors managed to mitigate the damage, and Zhang is now on his way to a full recovery.

“The carotid artery is an important blood vessel that supplies blood to the brain. When the intima of the blood vessel wall is torn, blood seeps into the blood vessel wall to form a “dissection”, which can cause stenosis or even occlusion of the blood vessels, leading to insufficient blood supply to the brain and eventually developing into cerebral infarction,” Dr. Liu Yan from the hospital’s Department of Neurology explained. “In addition, the blood vessels in the neck are superficial, and improper external force compression (such as vigorous massage, sudden head turning, “twisting the neck”, etc.) may directly damage the blood vessels.”

Neck massage is no joke. Last year, we featured the tragic case of a young Thai singer who allegedly died as a result of a herniated spine disk caused by neck-twisting massage.