Removing items that people shouldn’t have swallowed isn’t necessarily atypical for a surgeon. But taking out 263 coins and 100 nails from a man’s stomach “stunned” surgeons in India, according to a South West News Service report published in The Independent. U.S. News was unable to independently confirm the report.
Newsweek says surgeons took out more than 15 pounds worth of nails, coins, razor blades and more from patient Maksud Khan. He reportedly came into the hospital with abdominal pain, and doctors discovered these objects after they looked inside his body via an endoscopy.
Khan, the driver of a three-wheeled vehicle, swallowed coins his customers paid him, his doctors said. Relatives claim he became depressed and could have made consuming metal objects a habit. South West News Service reported the man is thought to have mental health issues.
Apparently, it’s good sought help when he did.
“The operation was done in the nick of the time” as some of the nails had pierced his stomach, caused bleeding and resulted in loss of haemoglobin, a doctor who performed Khan’s surgery said.
Live Science noted several other cases of swallowing inappropriate items, including one earlier this year where a man in France had psychosis and was found to have more than 100 pieces of metal in his stomach.
Elsewhere, a 42-year-old man in India gulped down 40 knives in 2016. Newsweek reports that psychiatric patients eat knives “compulsively” as a stress reliever or because they think something bad could happen if they didn’t do it. The publication also points out Khan could suffer from a condition called pica, in which people eat things even if they aren’t food — think metal, paper or hair.
Foreign-body-ingestion causes the deaths of 1,500 to 2,750 Americans annually, reports Newsweek.
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Report: Doctors Remove Hundreds of Coins, Nails From Patient originally appeared on usnews.com
