Got a weird craving? Take a number and get in line; it’s more common than you think.
In this photo from November 2007, Dr. Abdul Manan, a surgeon at the Nishtar hospital in Multan, Pakistan, points to an x-ray of a Pepsi bottle lodged in a sixty-year-old man’s lower abdomen.
Photo source: thexodirectory.com
The Big Eaters
- 1927: According to the Guinness Book of World Records, a forty-two-year-old woman, experiencing “slight abdominal pain,” had 2,533 objects removed from her stomach—including 947 bent pins.
- 1985: A man had 212 objects removed from his stomach, including fifty-three toothbrushes, two razors, two telescopic aerials, and 150 handles of disposable razors.
- July 2006: AP reported that doctors removed 119 nails, each about three inches long, from a Vietnamese woman’s stomach. Many of the nails were rusty, indicating that they had been in there for months.
- August 2006: Physicians extracted eight nails, a knife, a pen, a screw, a spoon, and a clothes-peg from a Serbian man’s stomach. There were also several other smaller objects in his stomach.
- 2007: The New England Journal of Medicine reported the removal of a hairball weighing ten pounds from the stomach of an eighteen-year-old Chicago woman.
Photo source: thexodirectory.com
Variety Is the Spice of Life
Some types of strange consumption are common enough to warrant being assigned medical terminology:
- xylophagia: eating wooden toothpicks
- coniophagia: eating dust
- geophagia: eating clay or dirt
- amylophagia: eating laundry starch and paste
- trichophagia: eating hair
- coprophagia: eating feces
This x-ray shows a cell phone lodged in a man’s lower intestine.
Photo source: thexodirectory.com
Pica
This is an eating disorder defined by the persistent eating of nonnutritive substances for at least one month. Dr. Cynthia R. Ellis, Director of Developmental Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center notes that individuals diagnosed with pica have been reported to consume clay, dirt, sand, stones, pebbles, hair, feces, lead, laundry starch, vinyl gloves, plastic, pencil erasers, ice, fingernails, paper, paint chips, coal, chalk, wood, plaster, light bulbs, needles, string, cigarette butts and ashes, wire, and burnt matches. Dr. Mary Gavin of KidsHealth.com includes glue, buttons, toothpaste, and soap. Wax and paint are also on the list. Pica can be caused by nutrient deficiency, mental illness, developmental disability, and occasionally, pregnancy. Stories related by sufferers include that of a woman who followed her husband around eating the ashes from ashtrays he used. A man suffering from trichophagia had been sneaking hair out of his mother’s hairbrush.
Hairballs
Although stomach acid can dissolve razor blades in a remarkably short time, human hair is tougher—almost impossible to break down. Possibly because of this resilience, hairballs taken from human stomachs are well-documented, both medically and visually. Did you know there is a National Hairball Awareness Day? Yes, on April 27. The National Museum of Health and Medicine has in its anatomical collection twenty-four veterinary and three human hairballs or “trichobezoars.” These two photos record the surgical removal of a trichobezoar from a human stomach.
Photo source: National Museum of Health and Medicine
The End
The yang to the yin of bizarre food yens (sorry) is the compulsion to stick strange objects into one’s own rectum. (I couldn’t help going here.) According to Cecil Adams in More of the Straight Dope, medical journals document an unending list of objects extracted by physicians:
- Edibles: vegetables are obvious favorites (especially zucchini and carrots—one was eleven inches long), but apples and turnips are included (providing an ironic response to dieticians’ constant injunctions to fill up on fruits and veggies); a hard-boiled egg and a frozen pig’s tail are also on the list
- Bottles (Mrs. Butterworth’s, Coke)
- Jars and cans (Vaseline, peanut butter, baby powder)
- Cooking and eating implements (tumblers and glasses, a plastic spatula, a teacup)
- Handles (from an ax and an umbrella—all eighteen inches of it)
