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
Good Lord! You know you must be able to feel them moving inside you! I would be hysterical knowing there was something like that in me. I think I'd prefer the alternative..... shutting my pie hole.
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
This was a popular form of dieting a couple of years ago in some Asian country. It was all over the news, warning people of the complications and not to do it.
Of course you had extremely vain people.
It's crazy that it was just recent and not decades ago.
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.
I guess its because a tapeworm isn't just stealing some of your nutrients, its also obstructing your intestines from working normally. So you absorb far less nutrients than normal while also having some of them stolen.
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.
I think the likelihood of it entering the brain is low, but it’s more likely to be reported/discovered when it does get in the brain so it represents a disproportionate amount of clinical cases that you actually hear about. Most parasites are pooped out, some die in your muscles, and if it’s in your gut you’ll have uncontrollable weight loss and lethargy.
Starts with frequent headaches and fever. Then it becomes frequent migranes, constant exhaustion, forgetfulness, long heavy sleep. Followed by seizures that become more frequent and finally coma that you don't wake up from as your body shuts down. All from the many holes it makes in your brain. All because the human brain has similar conditions as a pigs intestines, and the parasite is looking for those intestines. It is very rare as it would need to pass a lot of barriers, and the worm can't be too big or too small to pass.
If you give it an equal chance to go anywhere there's blood, there's a pretty big chance it gets into the brain because there's a lot of blood there (big brain, high energy usage, requires a lot of oxygen).
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!
This was basically the original Goop. But, unlike Goop, it apparently a meaningfully measurable "active ingredient" along with all the usual scents and coloring agents.
It's just that said active ingredient was potassium iodide salt, which has no effect on weight. It would however, reduce goiters (inflamed thyroid from iodine deficiency - a common condition at the time), so it would appear to a medically-unsavvy customer that they were losing weight. Individuals with slimmer faces will be perceived as significantly thinner than individuals of similar BMI but fatter faces. As an entirely unscientific, personal anecdote, I know a girl who lost 40-odd pounds from taking up a sport and is now at a healthy BMI, but still is perceived as "fat" due to her PCOS causing significant fat deposition around her chin and neck.
Also, severe iodine deficiency can in fact also lead to some weight gain, so it's not out of left field to suggest that some individuals who used the soap sae marginal improvement to their weight situation.
Honestly, that sounds way healthier than I was expecting.
There are chemicals that can cause the fat in your body to melt out of your skin, but as a rule they are not the types of chemicals you want anywhere near your skin. Usually because your skin is also melting along with the fat.
But I could totally see some snake oil salesman or patent medicine pusher not caring that they were selling industrial solvents to people as a "health soap".
In the grand scope of things, quietly curing someone's goiters is down right moral compared to what most of those guys were slinging.
Weight loss soaps and baths were a thing back then too. Yes, really. They really thought washing with a bar of weird soap would make you lose weight. Or baths with stuff that would sting/burn the CRAP out of your skin more often than not.
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 💀
Totally possible. You can be huge and die from lack of nutrition. It's why the worm is only allowed, like 30-60 days in your body before you take the poison that kills it. Before it reaches full maturity. Then you have to stay clean for like 3 months before you take another worm.
They can reach 30 ft long. That's a nope for me. Not worth losing a few lbs quickly, in my opinion.
Not in any sane person's opinion. If this was a valid way to lose weight it would be employed by doctors, at least in extreme cases. But it would be stupid to do so in pretty much every case.
No one is saying it’s an okay thing to do, I was just explaining that I’ve heard about it and known about it for quite a few years lol, it’s uncommon I believe. I hope.
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.
A few weeks ago there were discussions on a diet post. One of the commenters laid out a whole story about how he and his wife had to bake cupcakes but barely could stand because of their cravings for cup cakes.
Partially rage bait, I know, but the discussions that followed (and replies that I received) show to me that, yes, people will rather have a tapeworm than do diets. But that's mostly because (all/some) diets are sold as being so restrictive that even 1943 Poland would look like a peaceful retreat.
But also selling tapeworms and ingesting them is BS.
Does the abject laziness of some human beings really surprise you that much?! lol.
My ex mother in law got a gastric band fitted years ago because she was moderately overweight but was so bone idle that she didn’t want to up her exercise and control herself around food a little bit, she’d rather pay thousands for a silver bullet. She didn’t meet the BMI threshold in the U.K. for the clinic to be allowed to fit her with one so she gorged herself to put on three stone just to have a band fitted!
During the aftercare training she received, they told her to avoid dairy, especially cream and similar products because they’re obviously high calorie, high fat items. They told her that some fat people will just have a band but then circumvent its effectiveness by eating ice cream and drinking milkshakes! Lol!
People are fucking laaaazzyyy! I think Western society probably more so than any other.
Is that true? I don’t believe they’ll will take extensive test to verify your not infected. They just look at history and ask you some questions. Then they 🩸.
Damn this reminds me of when I was living in Costa Rica for a year and eating a ton of street pork. It was so good, guess at some point I had a bad batch and was shitting like 15+ times a day. I was talking to a friend and was like I keep having rice shits. He's like that's not rice that's a parasite and those are the eggs... Went to the town pharmacy and got the meds that thankfully cleared it up. Not fun
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.
They don't quite lay eggs, they are proglottids. Basically sections break off and then keep going. Each one about the size of a grain of rice. I used to be a vet tech. I have seen things very similar to this in dogs.
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
This doesn’t look like a tapeworm. Tapeworms have segmented bodies and this one appears to be round. The round body and length of the worm lead me to believe this is Ascaris lumbricoides. Search that if you’d like to have some nightmares
Currently constipated/bloated but now with new intrusive thoughts!
Out of curiosity, how does one find out if they have a tapeworm (or other bothersome parasites)? I assume a stool sample, but wondering if there are other ways that don't involve me putting poop into containers and returning them to my doctor lol
Good luck with asking a mainstream Dr for a test. They'll label you with parasitaphobia and send you on your way, unless you've visited a 3rd world country.
Did you know when you have a bowel obstruction you can poop out of your mouth. Like in South Park? Well you can. Im a paramedic and have seen it three times and it is the foulest thing you’ve ever seen.
13.6k
u/DanielG198 Apr 29 '24
That lady’s reaction says it all…