Has this ever actually happened? I can’t find any reference to it. My martial arts friends say that while it may be possible for a master to kill someone by an upwards palm strike to the nose, there are certainly easier and more sure ways to achieve the same result.
It’s a myth. The nose is cartilege, not bone.
I don’t know of any way of killing a person instantly that doesn’t involve something drastic like firing a projectile into their brain. I also don’t think a person can break another person’s neck with pure muscle force.
A good clear shot with the side of your palm or your front knucles to the throat sometimes will do the trick. Apparently, that bone isn’t terribly difficult to break. The only reference I have for that is my physician friend who also stuided martial arts, so take it is as you wish. I certainly haven’t done any field research on the topic.
Completely false. False from two perspectives. From the martial arts standpoint the upwards strike to the nose isn’t likely to send bone fragments flying around. It will, if done strongly, break the nose and cause a lot of bleeding but that’s it. The problem is that no martial arts strike is likely to cause bone fragments. To produce bone fragments you need very high blunt force, like that from a policeman’s night stick (PR-24). Most martial arts break deal with leverage not actually striking to break. I.e. the bone is placed in a position where it cannot move anymore and is forced to move more. In this case, although it is a blunt force break but it lacks sufficient strength to really cause fragmentation of bone.
From the medical standpoint there are problems too. First, small bone fragments will not necessarily (and I have been told are not even likely) to kill somebody instantly or even at all.
If enough force is delivered to the head from any direction, there will be a consequential brain injury because of the kinetic energy involved. A sudden blow (from whatever mechanism) of sufficient force will cause a “coup-contracoup” injury, where two areas of the brain are injured: directly below the blow and on the opposite side of the cranial vault. The result is haemorrhage into the cranial space and/or directly into the cerebrum. Blood vessels become compressed, leading to a situation of hypoxic brain cells, which swell, further compounding the problem. Raised intracranial pressure is viscious circle of downward decline into death, unless a way can be found to halt the process. Read about it in any trauma medicine text.
It is this mechanism of injury that leads to brain injury and death, and not the bone fragments that were mentioned in a previous post. Hence a martial arts blow could be fatal.
My old karate instructor used to work as a security guard and tried quite often to do it, but couldn’t. (What can you say? Bored Kalamazoo security guards…).
If you’re going to kill someone by damaging their brain, there are many better angles to hit from than straight through some of the thickest bone on the skull.
I vaguely recall reading some reports of brain trauma caused this way in head-on vehicle collisions-face slams into steering wheel at just the right angle to drive some of the cartilage into the brain. (Feel the top of your nose-some of that cartilage is quite rigid, and there isn’t any hard bone behind it. I’ll see if I can track down some documentation.) I don’t know of any documented cases of someone doing this with an unarmed strike. It seems to me that the combination of force and precision would be far beyond human capacity. But I’m not a martial arts expert, so I should probably just shut up. 
I’ve read that it’s possible to kill with one strong hit/punch to the front of the neck. Apparently the larynx/pharynx can be crushed.
Studi
I’ve read that it’s possible to kill with one strong hit/punch to the front of the neck. Apparently the larynx/pharynx can be crushed.
Studi
Another thing to remember is that sending a projectile through the brain usually isn’t fatal. If it hits the very center part (sometimes called the reptile brain, because that’s all the more that most reptiles have), that’s instant death, but if it just goes though the “higher” portions of the brain, which comprise most of the volume, the victim will probably survive. There’ll likely be impairment or a change of the person’s personality, but not death or even necessarily loss of intelligence. A closed-head wound is likely to cause more damage.
An icepick in the ear always works nicely. 
I should mention that it’s possible to kill someone by punching them extremely hard in the chest, but the person has to be susceptible to that kind of damage in the first place. The heart is essentially shocked into fibrillation or something, leading to death if untreated. This is probably the origin of the myth of ‘chi’. I can deliver pretty powerful 1" punch using the hips and body mass as leverage, and I’ll bet Glitch can too. Do that to the right person, and it’ll look like you laid your hand on him and killed him with your ‘spiritual force’.
There have been a number of deaths this way in sports. A couple of years ago an 18 year old kid was killed by taking a hockey puck in the chest from a hard slapshot. I believe a boxer was killed this way a few years ago, too.
But maybe the most reliable way of killing someone quickly with your bare hands would be a proper choke hold which cuts off blood flow to the brain. A person can die that way in a matter of seconds. And there have been a number of accidental fatalities from bouncers enthusiatically applying choke holds to rowdy patrons and keeping them in it just a little too long.
But the brain is actually a lot tougher than people think. People survive all kinds of serious head trauma, so there’s never a surefire way of killing someone that involves damaging the brain. In WWII a man survived after having a 1" diameter rod of steel punched right through his head. I’ve seen a picture of this - the guy is holding this giant steel spike that goes right through his head (not just the periphery, but it looked like it went almost through the center). There was another person who had his brain literally split in half right down the center. I seem to recall that this person exhibited some very strange symptoms because his left and right side could no longer communicate. Like, if he memorized something by looking at it with his right eye, he couldn’t recognize it when he closed his right eye and looked at it with his left one. Or something like that, anyway.
My wife has treated several patients who tried to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head with handguns. They just succeeded in lobotomizing themselves. And remember, lobotomies are a fairly low-tech procedure. One procedure I read about involved basically hammering an icepick through the eye socket, then once it was in the brain just kind of swishing it around to scramble up what’s in there.
Handgun bullets typically don’t have enough energy to deliver a killing force through hydrostatic shock. So the bullet actually has to penetrate and destroy tissue through contact.
As long as you don’t hit critical (but rather small) areas of the brain dedicated to regulating breathing and other autonomous functions, and you don’t sever the spine, the person has a good chance of surviving the initial blow, although they may eventually die from complications like pressure from bleeding or infection.
But something like a high-powered rifle bullet (especially a mushroom bullet) will deliver a shock wave through the mass of tissue that can play havoc with tissue far away from the impact point. So a rifle shot to the head is almost always instantly fatal.
But given all this, you can see how difficult it would be to kill someone with a blow to the head with your bare hands, no matter where you hit him. Hell, guys have been beaten on the head with baseball bats and survived.
That’s about what I thought. However, Sam Stone said the nose is made of cartilage, but that isn’t entirely true. This link shows a human skull in profile, and you can see that the nasal bone and part of the maxilla bone form the top portion of the nose. Thank you all for your input.
This may be a little off the subject, but here goes.
slight hijack…
If all this info is true then why do movie producers still film scenes with this happening? See, most of the time producers and directors go to great lengths to be factual, however you still see this scene pop up in action flicks. Don’t you think there must be some truth to this? I mean why would they continue to do this scene if it is totally impossible? Think about Conair. It must be possible. After all, everything that happens in the movies is possible.
End hijack…
An example of the death-by-smashing-nose-into-brain thing can be found in the 1977 movie Hereos. In it, Henry Winkler is in a bar fight with some bad dude and eventually gets the upper hand. After pinning him down on a table, Winkler tells the guy in excruciating detail how he can kill him instantly by striking his nose with the palm of his hand and shoving the cartilage into his brain. Spoiler alert: He didn’t do it of course. After all, he’s the Fonz.
“Most of the time producers and directors go out of their way to be factual.”
This is simply not true. It’s a very rare movie that is very accurate when it comes to arcane, technical details. This is one of my biggest peeves with hollywood movies. They’ll spend 100 million dollars making a movie, but won’t kick in an extra $10,000 to pay an expert to get the details right.
Almost every movie about martial arts is completely phony in how they are presented. People kill other people just by grabbing them by the chin and twisting their heads. One guy fights 20 and wins because they all stand around and let each other take turns rather than rushing him all at once. People are routinely knocked out with a single kick or punch, which almost never happens in real life.
Movies that get the details right in ANY discipline are rare. How many movies do you know of that showed computers accurately? How about airplanes? Guns? Electronics? Mechanical details?
Have you ever seen a guy jump off a building with a rope tied around his waist? And then maybe drop 50 feet before the rope ‘catches’ and saves his life? The REAL effect of that would be about the same as dropping 50 ft and landing on a metal bar. Rember Die Hard? Bruce Willis jumps down a ventilation shaft, and manages to grab a ledge with his fingertips after falling about 15 ft. I defy you to fall more than a foot and manage to hang onto something that way. After falling 15 ft, even if a magic arm came out and grabbed his wrists he’d at the very least dislocate both shoulders.
So forget *everything you see in movies. You’ll be far better off assuming that everything that comes out of Hollywood is pure fantasy unless you specifically know otherwise.
What Sam Stone said about movie accuracy. I love watching somebody with a handgun shoot three bad guys at 30’ while performing a log roll with 3-5 shots. Simply impossible. High quality electronics locks being broken into by removing the panel and shorting it out. Not likely. And don’t get me started on martial arts in movies.
As for why they use it? Because it is a myth that got started by somebody and it stuck. There is nothing special about the martial arts that keeps it from being subject to myths. In fact, I would say that the martial arts is more susceptible because the history of the martial arts is one of passing on of secrets. So it is very easy for somebody to say that they were passed on the ancient secrets of so and so that let you kill a man with your pinky finger and they can’t demonstrate it because it would be murder (they will gladly teach you if you pay the modest sum of $1,000).
Some facts about this technique:
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It is pretty effective. It will break the nose which hurts a whole hell of alot. Personally though with the risk of aids I would rather a hammer fist because the palm heel will end up covered in their blood. Same effect less risk.
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With reinforcement this is a devestating technique. Wrap your hand or arm around the back of the head and do the same technique and your likely to knock him out cold because his head won’t be able to recoil. If he is on the ground and you do this you could crack his skull and maybe kill him.
So you take a powerful technique and have somebody say that it is instantly deadly but they can’t demonstrate it because it is against the law to kill and poof instant myth. It gets into a movie and people start to buy it even more.
Okay, lemme see if I can get more than one quote in here without screwing it up.
No. The Cricoid Cartilage located inferior to the oropharynx is a circular structure that forms the lower portion of the larynx. It’s not a bone. If one was to apply a good clean knife strike ( or direct fist punch, I suppose, if your aim was really keen ) you could collapse the cartilage. That would cause immediate respiratory distress leading within several minutes to respiratory arrest. The trachea would have been collapsed and the airway compromised. You would suffocate to death. In the incredibly bad luck scenario, the cartilage could ( but most likely would not ever) sever the carotid artery or jugular vein, therefore causing death by internal bleeding. Much more likely is the first scenario described above.
Glitch is entirely accurate.
Originally posted by SCSimmons
I disagree. I’m looking at a detailed photograph of a corpse, dissected for teaching view. ( My EMT book. A veritable font of info). The proximal portion of the bone that covers the sinus cavity is in fact bone. It is only the distal portion near the end that is cartilage.
Originally posted by Sam Stone
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In fact, the Xyphoid Process could be hit and cracked. That would distress the solar plexus nerve bundle beneath it, and could kill you. The involuntary nerve connections that lead to the diaphragm and cause respirations ( breathing ) would be interrupted. You’d suffocate again. The odds of striking the Thoracic cavity hard enough to cause the Automaticity network of the heart muscle to distrupt normal firings and throw the person in the ventricular fibrillation is almost nil. No offense to the Masters posting here- I don’t doubt the focus or power that can be delivered. It’s just that the Thoracic cavity would dissipate such a blow. You’d split the sternum and, I suppose if you were to be THAT powerful, ram a broken bone backwards into the pericardium and heart muscle. But…a blow that would interrupt the Automaticity? No.
Sam, your movie factuality posting is SO on the money, however. Being in both the EMS world and the film industry allows me to see such highminded crapola be made in front of me. I just smile, roll the camera and submit my timecard.
Cartooniverse
Studi
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Registered: Dec 1999
Posts: 199
I’ve read that it’s possible to kill with one strong hit/punch to the front of the neck. Apparently the larynx/pharynx can be crushed.
you can kill someone by the throat by the nuckles of the fist hitting straight on. But by making an L shape w/ your first finger and the thumb and hitting there between this area you can just knock the air out of the person.
Cartooniverse: Regarding the killing blow to the chest - that’s why I said that it’s very unlikely to work with just a punch or a kick unless the person is susceptible to it - i.e. has a pre-existing condition. That was the case with both the hockey player and the boxer. Autopsies of both showed pre-existing heart defects, as I recall. Lots of players take slapshot pucks to the chest all the time and walk away with nothing more than a bad bruise. I myself had my sternum cracked by a hard blow in a car accident, and my wife had exactly the same injury in the same accident (from our seatbelts, which were defective in this car and always hanging slighly loose), but we both walked away.
Sleeping was literally a pain for a few weeks, though.
Back to bad moviemaking… This infuriates me, because it’s just so EASY to avoid. It’s clear to me that the filmmakers who make inaccurate movies like this simply have total disdain for the audience. I’m not talking about fantasy like the Matrix or Crouching Tiger… I’m talking about a guy flying an airplane and pulling the wrong controls to work the engines, or a guy ejecting out of an airplane that doesn’t actually have ejection seats (like the Herc in Die Hard 2), etc. This is just sloppiness that no one cares about because they think we’re all too stupid to notice. One of the latest fads along these lines is the slow-moving explosions and fireballs that the heroes outrun. In actuality, these things move at the speed of sound more or less, and will hit you before you even have time to blink away the light of the flash if you’re within a hundred feet or so.
This makes the movies that take the time to get the details right all the more precious. “Thief”, for example, hired a number of professional thieves as consultants, and actually gave them bit parts in the movie. All the tools used by James Caan to break into the safes and such were actual safecracking tools borrowed from the thieves on set. Even the voltages for telephone lines shown on the voltmeters were correct. As for the handgun use… The producers hired Jeff Cooper, a world-renowned weapons expert, to teach James Caan how to clear a building properly. None of this diving through doors with the gun held sideways…
As Roger Ebert has commented, even if most or all of these details go over your head, movies that take this kind of care almost always give you the feeling that what you are seeing is the way it would really happen. And that helps you lose yourself in the plot and characters. And it’s so damned CHEAP to do compared all the money and effort spent on FX and sets that it’s bloody infuriating to see it ignored.