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.
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