Look, I get the desire to call a man stupid because he seriously injured himself while using a massage gun on his eyes. I get it, I do. But I also sympathize with him. I haven’t done it, but the thought has crossed my mind, sometimes out of curiosity, other times because I have a headache that I want to jackhammer out of my skull. Fortunately, I never acted on it, or I might have ended up in the same situation as the man at the center of a case study published in BMJ Case Reports.

A guy in his 20s sought treatment in Edinburgh, Scotland, after experiencing flashing lights and an increasing number of floaters in his right eye. Doctors found multiple retinal tears, lots of bruising in both eyes, and something I had never heard of before called retinal dialysis, a nasty and quite serious tear in the boundary of the retina that is usually associated with blunt force trauma.

At first, the guy denied having any injuries at all. Clearly detecting bulls—t, the doctors pressed him for details, and he reluctantly admitted that he had been using one of those percussive massage guns that deliver dozens of little microbe punches a second directly on and around his eyes once a week for about three months as he tried to relieve eye strain and fatigue.

That’s like punching your d—k to cure your erectile dysfunction.

Man Seriously Injures Eyes After Using Massage Gun on His Face

Massage guns are essentially automated meat tenderizers designed to pound the heck out of soft tissue with a series of rapid bursts of intense force that can certainly improve circulation and ease soreness when used on, say, a weary calf muscle or a knotty shoulder. When applied to the eyes, it can deform an eyeball and severely damage a retina.

Once the doctors found that out, they immediately concluded that the massage gun was almost certainly responsible for the guy’s eye damage, causing a pattern of retinal damage so unusual that it seems like it might be the first documented case of its kind in all of medical literature.

Luckily for the guy, the doctors treated the retinal tears with laser procedures, and six months later, his vision was stable. He got lucky because these kinds of injuries, if left untreated, could eventually result in vision loss. Which, really, he should’ve expected considering that he basically subjected himself to perhaps several thousand punches to the eyes, experiencing a lifetime of a boxer’s ocular damage in less than a month.