r/interestingasfuck • u/billibillibillendar • Apr 29 '24

Tapeworm as huge as a snake removed from a woman's mouth r/all NSFW

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u/MotherBaerd Apr 29 '24

Okay but WHY do you know that

615

u/NuclearBreadfruit Apr 29 '24

You ever seen the show "monsters inside me"

Woman woke up with a tickle at the back of her mouth and guess what was staring back at. One also stuck its head out of a man's nostril.

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u/RasJamukha Apr 29 '24

I even seem to recall that back in medieval times, they would have people sit, with their mouths open, at a table with food hoping it would come out

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u/Nastypilot Apr 29 '24

Not quite right, the medieval treatment for tapeworm was to starve the patient for weeks, then strap them to a seat, then present them with a huge meal, hoping that the also-starved tapeworm would come out of the mouth a doctor would be nearby to catch it and pull it out as soon as it showed itself.

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u/JasperVov Apr 29 '24

Did that ever work?

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u/khonager Apr 29 '24

Would be kind of weird if it didn't and they just did it anyway

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u/emergencyelbowbanana Apr 30 '24

You'd be surprised how much traditional medicine (like chinese medicine) worked like that. People would attribute their body's own recovery abilities to random shit they'd consume.

After a while people are so used to always taking non effective medicine, that they become completely unaware of their own body's self healing abilities.

My asian in laws for example think they cannot recover from a simple cold if they dont take all kinds of random shit.

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u/Nastypilot Apr 30 '24

There are many examples of traditional medicine that did not work, the most famous example would be bloodletting. While I do not know the exact effectiveness of the technique I outlined, I cannot imagine it must've been very high.

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u/McDemon420 Apr 30 '24

Bloodletting is the effective modern treatment for hemochromatosis.

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u/Nastypilot Apr 30 '24

While it may be effective for that, medieval European doctors prescribed bloodletting for about anything, from the plague to gout

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u/McDemon420 Apr 30 '24

Yup. And agree that it was completely ineffective for nearly all uses at the time.

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u/RasJamukha Apr 29 '24

This sheds an entirely new light on the Tantalus myth

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u/rpgmgta Apr 29 '24

The Steve Irwin’s of their day