because the pictures are way too unsettling for gentle
readers:
(from Snopes.com)
Origins: The two disparate explanations for these photographs given
above are a good indicator of a common Internet phenomenon: Someone
makes pictures available on-line, they begin to circulate through
e-mail forwards, the original attribution is lost along the way,
people begin to make up stories to explain the origins of the
now-sourceless photographs, and those fabricated explanations
become attached to the pictures as they continue to
circulate.
Asking a dozen different medical experts about the photographs
shown above produced a dozen different answers — everything from a
skeptical "It's possible" to a flat-out assertion that the pictures
had "obviously been faked" (either at the photographic level using
a prosthetic device, or at the digital level with image editing
software). However, too often people get caught in the trap of
assuming that because photographs don't match the explanations
accompanying them, the pictures must have been fabricated or
manipulated, and one conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the
other.
Although the explanations quoted above are erroneous, these images
are in fact real and undoctored, and they are indeed photographs
taken of a patient whose brain surface was exposed and crawling
with insects. The pictures date
from October 2002, and they are photographs of a man in his 70s who
was suffering from an unusual form of cancer which had eaten away
at the upper portion of his skull and scalp but who had not sought
any medical treatment because the condition was not causing him
pain. The man was brought to the trauma center at Stanford
University Hospital (where the photographs shown here were taken)
by San Mateo County paramedics who had been summoned to the scene
after the man was involved in a minor automobile accident and who
found him in his car in the condition
pictured.
(source: Snopes.com)
(WARNING:
SOURCE CONTAINS REALLY DISTURBING PICS)
