Is decapitation by ceiling fan possible? (I’m not going to try it, I’m just curious!)
Mythbusters busted it.
Heavy damage from the industrial versions, but no decapitations.
(They were running the fan the less-damaging direction, though.)
I watched an episode of Mythbusters that addressed this very question. After testing several different scenarios, they concluded that unless you had a ceiling fan with sharpened metal blades (and powered by a lawnmower engine – how cool is that?) you were unlikely to suffer decapitation by ceiling fan.
They did, however prove that it was possible, under the right circumstances, to severely injure yourself by colliding with a ceiling fan’s whirling blades. In my own personal (second-hand) experience, when I was stationed at Shaw AFB in South Carolina, one of the guys from my shop stood up and stretched while visiting his wife at work. When he extended his arms over his head, one of his wrists tangled with a metal-bladed industrial ceiling fan. He required several stitches to close the wounds and claimed the nurse who stitched him up told him he was lucky the bones in his arm protected the arteries in his wrist – that otherwise he might have lost a life-threatening amount of blood.
I hope this helps answer your question.
–SSgt Baloo
And they say being in the Air Force isn’t dangerous! 
I managed to kick a cieling fan once. Of course, I had a loft bed at the time, and the fan very nearly overlapped the bed due to the small size of the room. If I was in a hurry geting out of bed, I’d occasionally kick a foot out to try and free it from my bed sheets, and if the fan happened to be on, WHACK. Of course, the fan motor wasn’t powerful enough for this to do anything but wake me up and send my room mate running in to see if I had broken my neck falling off the loft onto my desk below.
My room mate, OTOH, managed to smack himself in the face with a cieling fan, due to his freakish tallishness and his jumping up and down during some song at a party. 
That still bothers me. You’d think they would have reversed it.
On a school trip in junior high, one of the idiots I was traveling with decided to jump from bed to bed in the hotel room, with, you guessed it, a ceiling fan in between. It got him in the eye pretty good, and he got to go to a Mexican hospital to get it fixed. Better yet, it swelled shut, and he had to wait a few days before he could pry it open enough to remove his contact lens.
Still, his head remained attached.
I’ve reached up and stopped a ceiling fan (a regular home model) with my bare hand. So I’m going to say no, at least that type can’t decapitate you.
God, I would love to get that case in my autopsy suite. Wouldn’t that just be too cool.
The only decapitations I have seen (admittedly this is anecdotal, just my spotty experience) are in homicide by chain saw, suicide by subway train, and suicide by people who tie a rope around their necks and jump more than 20 feet.
Based on nothing more than personal experience in forensic neck dissection, I’d have to say them muscles and bones and stretchy skin are too thick and strong to get chopped off by a mere ceiling fan blade. Even the guy with the chain saw (who was working on an unconscious victim) had to make more than two attempts to get the head off. Vertebrae y’know.
Have you ever seen a ceiling fan run in the other direction? It wouldn’t blow the air down, which is the point of a fan.
Many ceiling fans have a reverse direction switch.
In fact, here’s a handy FAQ which explains why and when you should reverse the flow of the ceiling fans.
Once saw a gal in a drinkin’ joint dancin’ on a table get her head in the way of a ceiling fan. Hefty cut on her forehead, a lot of blood & crying; no lasting damage except to her pride.
And that’s why I love this board! 
OK, since you’re probably the SDMB decapitation expert, um, maybe that didn’t come out quite the way I meant it is the scenario described in post 38 of this thread likely to succeed?
Would I lie? 
Most of the ceiling fans I have seen have controls for the direction of the fan.
I can see how someone might be inclined to have one ceiling fan blowing air down, and another sucking air up, so as to circulate the air better. Particularly useful if one part of the room just gets warmer for some reason.
Yup. The general idea is that in summer you want it to pull the cool air up off the ground and in winter you want it to blow the hot air down of the ceiling. Either way you’re just mixing all the air, so I think what alot of people do is having it blowing down during summer so you can feel the breeze and up in winter so you don’t feel the breeze as much.
When I was a kid we had a ceiling fan with metal blades in our family room. My younger brother was playing around with a neighbor kid (he was about 3) and throwing him up in the air. They got a little too close to the fan and it sliced his cheek right open. I don’t think he went to the ER but he did have a scar there later. My brother always felt really bad about that.
Can we get the story behind this one?