A 78-year-old man in rural Uganda went to the hospital to fix a hernia. A routine chest X-ray taken before the operation turned up something far stranger: he had no collarbones at all. He had spent most of his working life doing manual labor and told doctors his shoulders had "always been this way."
Surgeons at Kampala International University Western Campus in Ishaka, Uganda, and the Université Catholique du Graben in the Democratic Republic of Congo described the case on August 10, 2026, in the International Medical Case Reports Journal. Complete absence of both collarbones, called bilateral clavicular agenesis, is extremely rare and is usually caught in childhood.
