Death eventually comes for us all, but for some, it comes in the worst of ways.
Wondering what the most painful ways to die are so that you can avoid them?
Do any snake bites make the list?
Keep watching to find out!
It probably shouldn't surprise you that one of the most painful ways to die isn't a natural
death at all, but was invented by humans to punish other humans.
Most people know about crucifixion from the story of Jesus Christ, but according to Britannica
the practice existed long before Christ's time, dating back to about the sixth century
BC.
Christ on the cross is one of the most famous examples of crucifixion, but many artists
choose to depict Christ in a beatific, peaceful manner.
There are only four relatively small wounds involved, after all, and while hanging on
a cross for hours doesn't seem pleasant, it also may not seem particularly painful — but
it is.
It's so painful, in fact, that, as noted by Azusa Pacific University, the word "excruciating"
actually derives from "crucifixion."
Forbes notes that most depictions of crucifixion get the details wrong.
The nails don't go through the palms, but through the wrists.
The outlet explains that it would feel like lightning going through your middle and ring
fingers while hitting the median nerve, making your hands contract in agony.
A similar strategy is employed on the feet, with the end result that breathing becomes
difficult and painful.
And while this torture is going on, insects may be gnawing away at the wounds, causing
even more pain.
While most people accept that drowning is a terrible way to die, they may assume it's
a relatively painless way to go.
After all, many people who are drowning don't actually appear to be in distress, according
to Slate.
And even when people are screaming for help and floundering, it seems more exhausting
than painful.
And when you finally sink under the waves, it may be assumed that you just pass out.
But drowning can be quite painful.
According to Medical Daily, when we're struggling in water, we tend to hyperventilate.
This usually leads to breathing in water, which causes a laryngospasm or vocal cord
spasm.
According to Healthline, breathing in water can be very painful, and if you get water
into your lungs the sensation is a searing pain that often lasts long after you're out
of the water.
“Get out of the water!
Get out!
Stop!”
According to an article in The Medico-Legal Journal, this process can be incredibly painful,
especially when combined with the sheer panic most people experience while actively drowning.
And, as noted by author Sebastian Junger in his book "The Perfect Storm," running out
of air and being unable to breathe is pure agony.
The only good news is that once you've been starved of oxygen long enough, you'll pass
out, and the rest of the drowning process will be pretty peaceful as a result.
As you might imagine, death by electrocution isn't fun — in fact, it's incredibly painful.
This has been clearly documented by witnessing what happens when prisoners are put to death
in the electric chair.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, it is horrific.
The voltage coursing through the body often causes muscles to seize, which can result
in broken bones and fractures.
Tissues swell up painfully, and skin can turn bright red and often cracks open as the swelling
gets worse.
In addition, eyeballs can literally pop out of their sockets, and people often literally
catch fire — one man had flames shooting out of his head when he was electrocuted in
Florida in 1997, according to The Los Angeles Times.
And you don't need a professional execution to experience agony from electrocution.
Health reports that one survivor of an accidental electrocution experienced what they described
as "excruciating pain" that required some heavy-duty pain meds.
And the National Center for Biotechnology Information Bookshelf notes that many people
who are electrocuted suffer cardiac injuries which result in severe chest pain.
The bottom line is that being electrocuted — whether by the state or Mother Nature
— can be an excruciatingly painful way to die.
“Don’t kill me.”
No one's surprised to see "burning to death" on a list of the most painful deaths.
If you've ever received even a small burn, it's horrific to imagine that sensation multiplied
over your entire body.
According to Valerie Rao, M.D., in her article "Forensic Pathology of Thermal Injuries,"
people who burn to death see their skin turn black and then split open to expose the tissue
beneath to the flames.
They may choke on smoke and soot, and their muscles seize up painfully.
It's often even painful to breathe because of the superheated air around them.
According to The Guardian, the pain is most intense when the flames first burn the skin,
and then subsides when the nerves have basically been burned away.
But then the flames spread to the next area of skin to begin the process over again.
And that's just simple burning.
For an even more intensely agonizing way to die, get caught in a pyroclastic flow — aka,
lava.
According to IFLScience, lava flows can attain temperatures of 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit.
Getting caught in it might seem like instantaneous death — but that instant would be agonizing.
Your skin would be instantly cooked through, and your whole body would contract into what's
called a "pugilistic pose" as it slammed into instant rigor mortis.
Your brain might also boil inside your skull, shattering it in the process.
Radiation is terrifying because it's often deadly but invisible.
You can be standing in a room absolutely smothered in deadly radiation and not know until your
body starts to break down in agony.
As noted by researcher Lydia Zablotska, M.D., Ph.D. at the University of California, San
Francisco, acute radiation syndrome, or ARS, involves gamma radiation.
This means high-energy photons penetrate your body and damage both tissue and genetic material.
This can result in a cascade of health problems.
There’s bone marrow damage and resulting loss of immunity response, damage to the intestines
leading to dehydration and infection, and finally the collapse of your circulatory system.
And if that sounds bad enough, according to an article in the scientific journal "Reports
of Practical Oncology and Radiotherapy," the pain and headache you experience is very excruciating.
The scariest thing about radiation poisoning is that you don't have to be involved with
a Chernobyl-style accident to experience this level of suffering.
As noted by The New York Times, in 2007 a man was accidentally exposed to beams of radiation
while undergoing treatment for tongue cancer.
He suffered deafness, blindness, the loss of his teeth and ability to swallow, ulcers
in his mouth and throat, and severe pain.
There's little doubt that radiation sickness is one of the most painful ways to go.
All cancers can cause pain.
According to The American Cancer Society, cancer can cause pain due to spinal cord compression,
where a tumor presses on the nerves in your back.
It can also cause damage to your bones, and from side effects of surgery and radiation
treatments.
According to Practical Pain Management, cancer can also inflict excruciating pain on its
victims by directly attacking the nerve cells in your body.
While any cancer can become agonizing as it advances, MedicineNet notes that pancreatic
cancer is not just one of the deadliest cancers, it's also often the most painful.
This is because it aggressively invades the nerves near the pancreas.
This leads to severe abdominal and back pain, and can lead to intestinal blockages that
increase the suffering.
According to Healthline, pancreatic cancer is also very difficult to diagnose, and about
80% of tumors aren't detected until the disease is advanced enough to start causing agonizing
pain.
Pancreatic Cancer UK adds that pancreatic cancer can also cause soft-tissue pain.
This is a deep-seated aching or cramping that can be difficult to pinpoint, especially because
it can cause pain in a distant part of the body, known as referred pain.
Lethal injection is supposed to be more humane than other forms of execution.
As explained by Britannica, in theory this is true.
Lethal injection originally included three distinct components: a barbiturate and anesthetic
to render the victim unconscious and numb their pain, a muscle relaxant that would paralyze
them, and a drug to cause irreversible cardiac arrest.
If everything goes perfectly, a lethal injection should render a condemned person dead in five
minutes with a minimum of pain.
Unfortunately, that's not the case.
After years of legal challenges, most states have abandoned the three-drug protocol in
favor of using single drugs, most of which have never been studied or tested.
According to The New York Times, even when lethal injection protocols are followed perfectly
they can often result in 14 minutes of, quote, “pain and horror."
The Equal Justice Initiative reports it can sometimes be more like two hours, and NPR
reports that lethal injection causes agony and a sensation very similar to drowning.
Autopsies of executed prisoners have found their lungs filled with fluid and blood — an
extreme pulmonary edema.
The pain caused by this condition is described as severe.
"Don't downplay my terror of going back to that chair."
Worst of all, many of the drugs used in lethal injection are not anesthetics.
They induce sleepiness, but don't do anything to stop pain.
Witnesses to executions have described the condemned exhibiting signs of agony.
A heart attack is one of the most familiar causes of death in the modern world.
It's been depicted in films and television shows so often everyone is familiar with it,
and the idea of suddenly keeling over is terrifying.
While some heart attacks are relatively painless — and thus difficult for people to recognize
— a heart attack can be an incredibly painful way to die.
Worse, even the warning signs of a heart attack can be pretty painful to experience.
In fact, one of the most common words associated with heart attacks is "excruciating."
As noted by Healthline, almost all the warnings that you're about to have a heart attack involve
severe pain — for example intense chest pain, which is often described as if an elephant
was sitting on your chest, according to The American Heart Association.
You can also experience painful symptoms in your chest that feel like heartburn.
Other symptoms include pain in arms, the upper back, shoulders, or the jaw.
WebMD describes a woman who woke up with severe pain shooting down her arm.
The popular conception of freezing to death tends to be a dark sort of peace — kind
of like falling asleep.
But according to Transport Canada, the drowsy sense of drifting away is the second stage
of hypothermia that usually occurs right before losing consciousness.
According to HowStuffWorks, freezing to death is a process, starting with uncontrollable
shivering as your body attempts to generate heat, then moving to muscle stiffness and
disorientation as your heat-starved body begins to malfunction.
And those malfunctions can be agonizing.
As explained by Outside Online, when your core body temperature drops, your body will
pull circulating blood from your extremities to keep your vital organs warmer, resulting
in excruciating aching in your hands and feet.
Frostbite can develop, inflicting even more suffering on your body as its initial stages
are often accompanied by a burning sensation, according to WebMD — though if it worsens,
you'll soon lose all feeling in the affected areas.
After that, it's true that you'll feel less and less pain as your body numbs and your
brain starts to misfire.
This plunges you into a confusion that can lead to what scientists call paradoxic undressing,
which Live Science explains is when people suffering severe hypothermia actually take
off their clothes.
They also often attempt to burrow into the freezing ground while naked.
The word "boomslang" might sound like something out of a sci-fi novel, but a boomslang is
actually a species of snake, a member of the Colubridae or rear-fanged snake family.
It also sports one of the most fatal venoms a human can encounter.
According to Britannica, boomslang venom causes hemorrhages, and even a tiny amount of it
can kill you.
Worst of all, death by boomslang is one of the most painful ways you can die.
IFLScience reports that the venom causes your body to create a lot of tiny blood clots,
which makes it impossible to clot when you need it.
This results in both internal bleeding and bleeding from the orifices, along with severe
fever, nausea, and uncontrollable shaking.
According to the Natural History Museum, when researcher Karl P. Schmidt was bitten by a
boomslang in 1957, he didn't seek treatment immediately, choosing instead to keep a diary
of his experience.
The diary is tough reading, because Schmidt experienced agonizing pain as he bled from
his gums, eyes, and mouth, urinated blood, and vomited blood and anything else in his
stomach.
“No way did that just happen, man.”
Luckily for you, your chances of encountering a boomslang are relatively small unless you're
in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the South African National Biodiversity Institute.
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