 When people have asked me if microwave ovens are hazardous, my typical snide response is, yes, if you drop them on your foot. But it turns out that's actually a real thing. Hundreds of Americans end up in the emergency room every year because a microwave dropped on them, or they hurt their back trying to lift one, or falling onto a microwave oven. I'm not sure how that works. Maybe they're like tripped on it. But the majority of microwave injuries involve scalding oneself on hot foods or liquids. But when people go to PubMed and search the medical literature and see all these scary-sounding titles about the hazards of microwave ovens, they may not realize that these are like articles about jelly donuts. Hazards of a microwave oven. An adolescent patient ravenously hungry rushed home from school for his afternoon snack, found a jelly donut, popped it in the microwave. The outside was just comfortably warm, and so he gulped it down before the searing pain started from the burning jelly inside, and he had to go to the hospital. And that's the tricky thing about microwave cooking. With conventional cooking, the outside is hotter than the inside. But with microwaving, the inside can get burning hot, even while the outside remains relatively cool. Now, there's still a lot more kids getting burned from regular stoves. The injuries related to stove use vastly exceed those associated with microwave ovens. Over a five-year period, about 40,000 compared to 5,000 with microwaves, and the stove burns tend to be more severe as well. In fact, you know how you're never supposed to heat infant formula in a microwave, since you may not be able to judge the heat of the contents just by feeling the outside of the bottle? Well, if you heat that warning and use a pot or bowl of hot water to warm it instead, you may actually end up with higher burn risk from accidentally knocking over scalding water. So what's their solution? They suggest not warming it up at all, and that's basically just a cultural thing that we feel the need to warm it, or even better, how about not bottle-feeding it all and go for scald-proof milk at perfect body temperature? And when it comes to food, whether it's a jelly donut or jelly roll or microwave treacle tart or a cheese pie, basically anything that's kind of soft in the middle can present a problem. But look, anytime there's anything liquid inside, can't you just open it up and let it cool before you eat it? What's the big deal? That brings us to the case of the exploding egg. Although there are many mishaps regarding the microwave, the most pertinent for pediatric patients seems to be the exploding egg. When heated in the microwave, the yolk absorbs the energy, getting overheated and pressurized, and both the yolk membrane and shell acts as a pressure barrier, and any disturbance can make it go boom. There have even been cases which the shells have been cracked open, but then it still explodes when the yolk membrane was pierced with a fork. And the explosion can be so powerful and sudden that it exceeds the blinking reflex, leaving the eyes unprotected, which can lead to vision-threatening injuries. Normally it's just facial burns, but her poor brother had his face right over the plate and got his eyes burned and ended up in the hospital. Anthemologists should be aware of the serious risk and caution the public against the dangers of cooking eggs in microwave ovens. But come on, how common is this? There's all sorts of quirky case reports in the medical literature, like people getting eye injuries from eggs thrown out on Halloween or something. But if you do a search, there do seem to be a bunch of papers on exploding eggs, but I figured the best way to tell if this was a real phenomenon would be to search on YouTube, and holy moly, 25,000 videos, including one with more than a million views. Do not try this at home. There's even an article in a journal on teaching physics about how to use microwave ovens to perform exciting demonstrations, like spectacular egg explosions, denting the metal while blowing the door open and making the whole oven jump up. Now if the eggs just exploded inside, that's one thing, but the problem is that it can happen at the table. You sit down to eat them and then boom! The majority of egg injuries are to the face, eyes, and nose, but it can also explode straight into your mouth than put you in the hospital. Microwave oven manufacturers evidently specifically warn against microwaving eggs intact and advise not only removing the shell, but piercing the yolk prior to cooking. Even reheating can be a problem. She was just carrying it in a bowl to the dining room when it exploded, rupturing her eye, causing a serious enough injury that this group of ophthalmologists were like, look, forget just putting it in the instruction manual. Maybe there should be a warning about eggs on the microwave itself.