Death is inevitable, though science has revealed what might be the most painful ways to go.
Nearly 10,000 Americans die every day, adding up to about 3million per year, according to the CDC.
Most of these are from conditions like heart disease and cancer, though some are more bizarre and painful than others.
Within minutes, people burned alive will have their skin stripped away while their organs boil and decompose.
Deep sea divers who come up to the surface too quickly, meanwhile, may suffer severe muscle cramps as gases attack their brain and spinal cord.
In extreme cases, they may even watch their organs fly out of their bodies.
And severe radiation can cause the lungs to rapidly drown themselves with fluid and eyes to become so dry they ‘cry’ blood.
DailyMail.com has revealed the most brutal ways to die, as told by science.
Being burned alive
Maxwell Azzarello doused himself in an alcohol substance before self-immolating near a Manhattan criminal court last year (pictured here)
Being burned alive typically causes death in just a few minutes. However, those few minutes are torturous.
Fire causes soft tissues to contract, which leads to skin tearing off in layers, starting with the outermost layer, the epidermis.
In just seconds, fire can strip the body of its deepest skin later, the hypodermis. This is composed of fat cells and connective tissue that protect organs from trauma.
Once all the skin burns off, fire burns muscles and fat, causing them to shrink. With nothing left to protect the organs, they can either boil or start to decompose.
The eyes may also boil, causing blindness.
Often, however, people being burned alive typically die from smoke inhalation. In fact, smoke inhalation is responsible for about eight in 10 fire-related deaths.
The smoke cuts off the body’s oxygen supply, leading to difficulty breathing.
A fire victim may also inhale chemicals from the smoke like carbon monoxide, which can lead to nausea, vomiting, severe pain, and convulsions.
Sebastian Zapeta-Calil is shown sitting on a subway bench watching as the woman he set fire to burns alive
While death by fire is often associated with the witch trials and historical figures like Joan of Arc, there have been several recent examples as well.
Last year, 37-year-old Maxwell Azzarello doused himself in alcohol and set himself on fire outside of the Manhattan courthouse where President Donald Trump faced criminal charges.
Two months prior, Air Force airman Aaron Bushnell, 25, self-immolated as an ‘extreme act of protest’ against the Israel-Gaza war.
And in December, Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, a 33-year-old migrant from Guatemala, set Debrina Kawam on fire while she road the subway. She died within minutes.
About 5,000 Americans die from fire every year.
Radiation poisoning
Hisashi Ouchi, 35, experienced unimaginable suffering in an 83-day ordeal after being exposed to a record-breaking amount of radiation
In small doses, radiation can be used to target and treat conditions like cancer by killing off harmful cells.
But in extreme and rare cases, high doses of radiation can burn the body from the inside out.
This was seen in the case of Hisashi Ouchi, a 35-year-old worker at a nuclear fuel processing plant in Japan.
In 1999, Ouchi and two of his colleagues were standing at a fuel tank when one of them added 35 pounds of uranium into a processor — seven times higher than the safe limit.
The team recalled a sudden flash of blue light before being hit with an explosion of radiation.
Ouchi, who was stood over the processing container at the time, was exposed to 17,000 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation, the most recorded by any person at a single time.
For context, the safety limit for those working around radiation is 20 mSv per year, with 5,000 mSv considered a fatal dose.
Dubbed the most ‘radioactive man’ in history, Ouchi’s ordeal started one fateful day at his workplace, a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo (pictured)
Though he seemed healthy at first, Ouchi deteriorated over 83 days as the extreme radiation exposure killed off his cells faster than his body could replace them.
His skin began falling off in layers to the point where he leaked gallons of bodily fluids through exposed flesh.
Ouchi’s lungs rapidly filled up with fluid due to his lung tissue becoming damaged, allowing fluid to leak out of the lungs’ air sacs.
The radiation also killed cells in his digestive system that would otherwise help him absorb food and medication. This caused him to excrete nearly a gallon of diarrhea every day.
Ouchi also needed 10 blood transfusions per day due to internal bleeding.
Additionally, the radiation damaged the lacrimal glands in his eyes, which produce tears. This caused his eyes to become so dry that his eyelids fell off and he began ‘crying blood.’
Ouchi died of multi-organ failure 83 days after his accident.
Only about 50 Americans have died from radiation sickness since World War II, and the majority of these were workers and firefighters during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Getting eaten alive by bugs
The above image shows scaphism, a torture technique in ancient Persia that involved a slow death by bees
Though far less common today, death by bees was once a common torture method.
In a recent YouTube video, mortician Caitlin Doughty explained that this method, called scaphism, was commonplace in ancient Persia.
It involved stripping a person of their clothing and placing them between two hollowed out logs with just the head and limbs sticking out.
Torturers would them pour honey all over the person’s body and into their eyes. They would also force the person to ingest milk and honey to cause diarrhea and repeat the process for days on end.
The gruesome practice was meant to attract bees and other insects, which would lay eggs and slowly eat the body alive.
Charmaine van Wyck, a forensic scientist in South Africa, told Newsweek that ancient torture techniques like this ‘were engineered to keep you alive and conscious as long as possible and as such inflict the max amount of pain.’
It’s unclear how many ancient Persians died from this technique.
LaShawn Thompson (pictured), a man who died in a bedbug-infested cell in a Georgia jail’s psychiatric wing ‘died due to severe neglect,’ according to an independent autopsy released by lawyers for his family
Much more recently, 35-year-old Lashawn Thompson was found dead in his Georgia prison cell in 2022 after being eaten alive by bed bugs.
Michael Harper, a lawyer for Mr Thompson’s family, said in a statement: ‘Mr Thompson was found dead in a filthy jail cell after being eaten alive by insects and bed bugs.
‘The jail cell Mr Thompson was housed in was not fit for a diseased animal. He did not deserve this.’
Though bed bug bites are usually harmless, severe infestations can lead to anemia, as bed bugs feed on blood.
Severe anemia reduces the amount of oxygen in the blood, which prevents it from traveling to and supplying vital organs.
This can lead to multi-organ failure, particularly the heart, as it can’t effectively pump blood to the rest of the body.
Though insects kill roughly 1million Americans per year, the vast majority of these are due to allergic reactions from stings.
Decompression sickness
On November 5, 1983, the Byford Dolphin incident shocked the offshore drilling industry, when routine maintenance work ended with workers dying instantly. One also saw his organs fly out of his body
More casually known as ‘the bends,’ decompression syndrome occurs when someone transitions from a high-pressure environment to a lower pressure environment too quickly.
This is most common in deep sea divers who plunge into the water with compressed air, pressurized air from a tank that lets them breathe normally.
According to Harvard University, diving with compressed air causes you to take in extra oxygen and nitrogen. The body uses the oxygen to breathe, but nitrogen dissolves into the blood.
Pressure decreases closer to the surface, but if the transition happens too quickly, nitrogen doesn’t have enough time to clear out of the blood.
The excess nitrogen spreads throughout the body and to surrounding organs, damaging blood vessels and blocking blood flow.
The bubbles also lead to severe muscle cramps and pain up until organs die.
An even more extreme case is explosive decompression, which occured during the 1983 Byford Dolphin oil rig disaster.
Divers working inside a decompression chamber when an error caused it to suddenly decompress.
Though most workers died instantly, their deaths were grisly. Three workers had their blood to ‘boil’ as dissolved nitrogen returned to a gas state fat accumulated and solidified in their arteries, veins, hearts and liver and their bodies were scattered throughout the chamber.
One worker, however, was forced through a 24-inch gap with a force of 25 tons and his organs burst out of his body.
The only way to prevent decompression sickness is to cautiously return to the surface to allow time for the nitrogen to diffuse naturally.
Experts estimate just under 600 Americans between 2006 and 2015 died from diving, though it’s unclear how many were from decompression sickness.
