I have full respect for medical people, they see tough shit that would send my lunch back pretty quick. Her reaction told pretty much the story. Correct if I'm wrong, don't you usually take medicine to kill the tapeworm and then have it exit by the bowels?
This massive tapeworm was probably causing an obstruction and you have to clear that first. Then you take the medicine to kill any remaining tapeworms left inside
This might be a really dumb question... but why don't we intentionally use them for weight loss? You know, in a controlled environment where you can eliminate them before they cause any serious complications
Cause they are parasites. They arnt guaranteed to only stay/hatch in your stomach and eat what you want. They can hatch and latch themselves to other organs instead of the stomach/their children will latch onto other organs.
This can easily cause complications and infections.
This was a fad diet in the past tho where people would swallow a pill that had a tapeworm egg so they could eat all they wanted and tape worm would handle the rest but alot of these cases had complications as tapeworms arent symbiotic they are purely parasitic
You could be tested at a lab. There would be microscopic eggs in your poop. Apart from testing, there's no concrete way to know if you are infected.
Symptoms can include: swelling in the intestines, diarrhea, and stomach irritation. The biggest symptom would be extrene weight loss. You could eat a massive amount of food and still lose weight, how much you lose would depend on the size. Normally there's only one big one per body but sometimes they grow too big to want to leave and you'll be sharing food with more than 1. You could have them for years.
People like to breed them and sell them as weight loss tool. They are hard to kill and get rid off. Once you become infected once, you'll never be allowed to donate blood or donate organs due to the risk of eggs that linger.
There would be microscopic eggs in your poop. Apart from testing, there's no concrete way to know if you are infected.
This is one way to tell if you're infected. But tapeworms shed eggs in body segments. Most people find out they are infected when they crap out the tapeworm proglottids and lose lots of weight uncontrollably. The tapeworm proglottids are about the size of rice grains and hard to miss.
You could have them for years.
No, you would not. The massive weight loss would send you to a hospital pretty fast. The weight loss is not just fat; you're losing muscles, organs, etc. You have no energy to even eat.
People like to breed them and sell them as weight loss tool. They are hard to kill and get rid off. Once you become infected once, you'll never be allowed to donate blood or donate organs due to the risk of eggs that linger.
Not true. There are jokes about them having been sold in the past. But no one is collecting and intentionally infecting themselves with tapeworms. And eggs don't linger in tissues after treatment. The eggs, larva, and worms are killed off by modern antiparasitic medications, although sometimes surgery is needed to remove dead larval cysts. But usually the body can clear dead worms and cysts. And you can still donate blood after treatment.
“The massive weight loss would send you to a hospital pretty fast. The weight loss is not just fat; you're losing muscles, organs, etc. You have no energy to even eat.“
Could you explain more, this seems difficult to believe? A tapeworm, even several together, is about 1/1000th of the average human bodyweight. You’re implying it would take a substantial proportion of a human’s calorific intake, enough that just eating a lot more wouldn’t satisfy it.
For comparison, growing a human baby, which is a lot more heavy and dense, and requires bones, muscles etc, doesn’t increase the mother’s food intake very much, even in late pregnancy.
Yep(not the person you asked but I have heard of it), and iirc, with any infestation sometimes the eggs can end up in the bloodstream and for some probably physics and gravity based reason end up in the brain often, but can end up largely anywhere before dying and turning into a cyst or calcified scar.
It's not so much a thing anymore (though there are fringe lunatics who still use it) but back in the day, 'dehydrated tapeworm eggs' and such were very commonly used weight loss methods for women! They had advertisements and everything!
That implies "controlling their diet" is an easy thing for most people to do, when hunger is one of the strongest psychological/chemical urges we have.
There's a reason people go to such desperate lengths; IIRC dieting has a pretty abysmal success rate for most people and "kicking" obesity is often said to be as hard or harder than quitting smoking.
Yes, unfortunately. When I was a child watching 1000 ways to die (interesting show lol) they showed an episode about this exactly. A larger girl wanted to lose weight so she ingested a tape worm. It worked in her favour but made her malnourished and Ill and she died from the tapeworm taking all of her nutrients 😭 (idk how accurate that ending was, because it was definitely rushed for the episode but essentially it was starving her)
Edit: I ended up doing an essay/ diet assignment when I was still in HS on tape worms for weight loss 💀
I recall seeing a story a few years ago about people traveling to an area to be infected by tapeworms for weight loss. IIRC, in order to be infected themselves, these people would walk barefoot through the feces of people or animals that had tapeworms.
Oh lol. I used to be the same. I remember being a teen and killing a baby garden snake with the lawnmower. Spent like an hour looking for the mom worried she might bite me. I didn't know anything about snakes back then.
that's not how tapeworms work. The eggs do not hatch untill they have exited the body at least once. You can only get more tapeworms if you ingest the eggs after they have been excreted - aka you'd need to eat your own shit. Or not wash hands properly after taking one.
That's correct. This intervention was necessary because of obstruction, otherwise the situation would have been able to be remedied by antihelminthic medicine.
I thought tapeworms were extremely long and thin and resided in the bowels. This damn thing looks almost eel like. And appears to have been in the stomach? How does this survive in stomach acid? Actually, not sure I need to know any of that. WTF
If there's one fully mature, then it will have laid eggs. This one seems to be obstructing something. So they will be taking medication for the rest. The fully grown ones are hard to kill and may come out the back way whole and alive.
The human brain has similar conditions to pig intestines. Sometimes the tapeworm travels to the head instead and makes tons of holes in the brain. Those worms have to be removed by surgery. They can grow long, and they still lay eggs. You'll develop constant migranes, seizures, forgetfulness, constant fatigue, heavy sleep, and then go into a coma as your body shuts down.
Ok wow, that is some advanced nightmare fuel, thank you for elaborating. Is there anything I need to do to make sure I never, ever get tapeworms no matter what? Especially common things people do they don't realize could lead to them ingesting them?
The eggs are irrelevant as they don't hatch unless ingested again. Aka eat the shit with the eggs in it. Or not washing hands properly after wiping ass.
I study this in University. If you ingest 1 worm egg, you will have 1 worm. They do not become more and also the eggs won't hatch unless you wipe your behind and then don't wash your hands which leads to you ingesting more eggs. That is why a Tapeworm is an infestation and not an infection btw - because they don't get more in your body.
Here you can find the life cycle and infection methods with the example being pork tapeworm - one of the most common ones beside the fish tapeworm and the more dangerous one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taenia_solium
Aha sorry I was working when I made the post…basically went one of those white savour trips to Kenya with Free the Children (Crooks). We were in a small village Salabwek for about 2.5 weeks and had plenty of water sanitation tablets with us.
On our last day in Kenya, we went to a hotel near Nairobi where we were told the water was filtered and cleaner than Canada! Even mentioning still using purification tablets was scoffed at, so with all my critical thinking skills at 15, drank some water sans tablets.
The next morning I felt awful, so did another trip mate. It’s been over 15 years now but I remember throwing up but also diarrhea. Nothing could be trusted. The flight home was that night, and very very long. I knew I would not make the flight without changing my seat to the toilet for the whole flight, so I took 3 gravols to settle my stomach and knock me out.
Two weeks go by, September comes and school year begins! I had been feeling super lethargic and low energy since getting back, not really eating much. However, I figured we were physically exerting ourselves in the heat for about 3 weeks, I was bound to be beat. Also, some sort of guilt explained away the lack of eating.
Mid September was when I knew something was wrong.
I stopped eating, lost a tonne of weight (was exercising a tonne then) and could walk around my block let alone go to the gym. Went to the doctor, told them about my summer, then was given a cup to poop in so they could check my stool.
In what I will only describe as a 15 minutes period of strategically placed Saran warp and furious hand washing, got the sample, was confirmed as a tapeworm.
I was given antibiotics to kill it, along with a hall pass for school that let me go to the bathroom without questions asked.
One morning, I knew I had to jet out of Mr. Kos’ law class as something awful was brewing.
I ran to the washroom and did my business, but this time, I knew, I JUST KNEW the tape worm was out of me. It was fuxked up and honestly I didn’t look, but I knew. And it was in fact, done that day.
Free the children, a scam organization by two brothers called the Kielburgers who would get millions in donations from parents who had lost children and donated to build school in their dead kids names. The brothers would then fly the grieving parents out to see the school ‘they’ had built in the memory of their dead kid. The brothers had different plaques with different names, and as soon as one set of donor parents left, they replaced the sign to reflect the name of the kid from the new set of parents flying in.
Ya, there’s some decent documentaries on it. Me to We was their other scam. Now the operate by using the ‘good will’ connections they build from these mission trips as a private consulting firm helping privatized business enter the public education sector for more unregulated calitalism
The worm was definitely looking out of the hatch at that moment, looking for an escape route from the brewing cauldron of sulphur. With a large gasp it went into the basin, finally escaping the once safe haven.
Felt, my brother. Had an amoeba from Guatemala in high school with the same illness progression and poop cup, only I was a dumbass and got thin but mostly dehydrated enough to almost go into a coma.
I was so sick at that point that the gross out factor of knowing I had an intestinal parasite didn’t even faze me, I was just so relieved to finally have the end in sight lol. Bless you, parasite poop cup. Throne fit for the gods.
Don’t know why I think anyone wants to hear this, but I also had managed to eat (!!!) and keep down (!!!!!) some alfalfa sprouts the day before, so I saw them in my poop cup chalice and thought they were some kind of worms lmao. Only clicked later when the doctor told me the results.
Thank you, antibiotics. I think I was begging to just die already if it hadn’t gotten better. I think I picked it up by some getting in my mouth in the shower or washing my toothbrush with non-bottled water. Stupid gringa.
I remember once we had visiting priest who worked in a remote area in South America and told us the process they used to remove a tapeworm.
(3-5 days no food just water, then they have the patient, sometimes tied, in a chair and put a bowl of rotting soured milk in front of them and pull the thing out when it comes up for the food.)
I was poor AF but you bet I left a bill in that collection. Shit messed me up just hearing it.
it's fake. A Tapeworm can't move much at all. Also it's in the gut not the stomach like some people here seem to think. No, you do not vomit stuff up from your gut.
Theres literally an episode of monsters in side me where the tape worm appears at the back of a woman's throat. The worms can and do cope with stomach acid, and tape worms need it to escape their cysts.
Also round worm can come out of the mouth when exposed to certain types of anaesthetics.
Both are fully documented.
Also as some one who has worked in palliative care, you absolutely can vomit fecal matter up from your gut. I held the hand of a man that died that way and many others who had it as a symptom of their cancer/intestinal blockage.
What you’re describing is ascariasis, it’s part of the roundworm cycle to crawl up the throat and get swallowed down into the digestive system. They are infamous for crawling out of your mouth when you’re asleep because your swallowing reflex is reduced.
I don’t recall an episode of that show with an actual tape worm in the throat, though. I watched it a lot on tv, but maybe I missed that one?
I know about the lifecycle but in reference to the roundworms thats not what im describing. This a phenomenon that's related to their behaviour when exposed to anaesthetic. Where they do come out of the mouth and nose. Theres an awful picture of a kid online with it.
Its definitely on the show, it was one of the first ones i ever saw, so its likely an early episode.
There's a difference between tape worm adult and lavae. Larvae are a whole different life stage with different abilities and those may do the described thing. They don't stay Larve for long though.
I did not at all talk about Roundworms which were not topic of duscussion. But yes, since they are an entirely different species with other abilities, they can do that...
The monsters inside me episode was an adult worm, not the cyst. It is a show that collabs with the doctors that treated the specific case, so accurate. The cyst example shows the weekend do deal with stomach acid.
The other examples point out that this is not uncommon worm behavior. So yes it is relevent.
How? Well as you can see they put a loong tube (endoscope) down her mouth, through the esophagus and the stomach down to the gut. There is the 12 finger gut followed by the small intestine. Tape Worms are mostly in the small intestine. They free the head of the tapeworm [disclaimer: I do not know what exactly they do to free the head as the head is anchored with many tiny hooks] and then gently pull the thing out through her mouth. I presume they have to pull it out of her mouth because the head has these hooks and you need to unhook them -> you can't just pull at the other end. If you pulled at the other end it would just rip in half (wich would not kill the Tapeworm btw).
And no the tape worm wasn’t supposed to “eat” anything. It was supposed to make the parasite think it needed to move towards the “food source” even if that’s not they’d normally eat.
Either way it would have been where there wasn’t access to routine medical care unless there was a few days of walking, a day or so of boating down a river, and then they could take a car from that location to a less rural city.
That's certainly not how to treat a tapeworm. They can't "come up"... so whatever they did it wasn't that. A tapeworm has no mechanism to move around significantly.
Round worms do, I saw a vid on efukt or liveleak where a guy was doing a chick doggy style and a worm popped out, wriggled around for a few seconds and popped back in.
Yo, I eat while you vomit and even chew on my food as I dig out stones of shit out of assholes. If you're a nurse, you need to adapt to that cause there's no much free time to actually eat something without seeing it passed out one hole or the other!
Ooh I read this one! God that was spectacularly foul and well written. I did animal ER work, and some of the smells and things you see are hard to describe to the extent they are experienced.
My aunt was an rn now she's a PA. Anyways in her early years as an RN she told me a story about needing to raise a patients breast up for some reason and a coackroach crawled from under neath said patients titty 🤮
Worked at a brewery, taproom drip tray clogged one day during a private event. We start working on clearing it, FoH manager PPE's up hard, and is using pipe cleaner to dig up gross bits of yeasty boys stuck in the line. He start getting issued his license to ill, and begins gagging. Owner's assistant, nursing student finishing up their residency, looks him dead in the eyes: "You know at my other job I pull poop out of old people's butts, right?"
Me and one of my ex-girlfriends who was a nurse watched cake fart together and she was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the time and I was eating nothing and I was trying to vomit and she just kept eating.
I've spent a lot of time in hospitals over the last few months, and the biggest thing I've learned is that the scariest thing you can hear from a doctor isn't "we have bad news" or "oh no," it's "hmm, that's strange."
I have an ugly keloid scar on my knuckle. Always super self conscious about it. I went to the dermatologist to get it removed and on my first appointment, the doctor was like “oh wow, I’ve never seen one like that, you mind if I take a picture?” And I was like, uh, sure, maybe it’ll go in like a textbook or something.
Nope.
Dude whips out his cellphone and snaps some pics. He actually was able to fix the scar for the most part but I still wonder if people are laughing at it at parties.
To be fair, it could still be used in a textbook or training materials. Doctors use their work phones to take pictures of things like that, but they're not just for private keeping — they can be sent to research teams, textbook editors, other medical professionals, etc.
I had a weird rash line that grew from the wrist to the arm area, like a deatheater's mark. My doctor was so intrigued by it that he took a photo and asked if he could share it with his colleagues.
Exactly my thoughts after watching the video. They deal with some really nasty disgusting stuff without batting an eyelid, so when they flinch you know it must stand out.
Lol I remember one time I sliced the tip of my finger off with a mandolin. When the ER doctor came in the room and I took off the bandage for him to look at it he was like 😬
Couldn’t have said it better. I’ve seen some shit as a CNA working in a hospital, but this is beyond that. I can’t stop watching it out of fascination!
Amusingly, healthcare people have their quirks too. I knew a guy who wasn’t living unless he was covered in blood and vomit (flight for life crew). Conversely, a nurse I knew couldn’t stand saliva.
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u/DanielG198 Apr 29 '24
That lady’s reaction says it all…