Can anyone benefit from being hit by lightning? The rational answer is no, but some curious reports of people cured of chronic medical conditions after lightning strikes seem to suggest the opposite.

In 1911, a bolt of lightning tore through a house in Connecticut and struck a 65-year-old woman who had been deaf since childhood. "Mrs Decker was lame and sore for a number of days," reported the New York Times. "Her hearing is now so good that she is able to carry on a conversation in an ordinary tone of voice."

A woman in Oklahoma who had been paralysed by multiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair was struck by lightning inside her bathroom. The lightning passed through metal piping, hurling the woman out of her wheelchair. She gradually regained feeling and movement in her legs over the following months and eventually walked again.

In England, a lightning strike several years ago blasted a shop front in Birmingham, throwing a woman inside to the floor and leaving her temporarily paralysed down her righthand side. When she woke up the next morning she found the severe arthritis that had crippled her right hand had completely disappeared.