There are many cures for constipation and many of them can simply be found in a pharmacy. It's safe to say inserting an eel into your anusto cure your lack of bowel movements is not a doctor recommended practice.
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An extremely dangerous practice
One man in his 50's didn't think so much about drugstore alternatives and instead decided to insert a live eel up his up his bumin hopes that it would eat some of his waste. Of course, the eel did more than his job after tearing a hole in the man's bowels leaving him with a deadly case of sepsis.
The man reported to Dongguan Huangjiang Hospital in Guangdong in China complaining of stomach pains.According to the head of general surgery Li Jian the man had severe sepsis leading to septic shock and could not communicate coherently. Doctor Li stated:
He came in with septic shock. During a CT scan, we suspected a foreign body in his abdominal cavity, but we couldn't tell what it was. Then while performing a colonoscopy, we discovered it was an Asian swamp eel (monopterus albus). It had entered his abdominal cavity.
Surgery just in time
The man was taken away for emergency surgeryin order to remove theeel and in a gruesome discovery, the surgeons also found extreme amounts of waste and pus amongst the man's organs.
An image taken by the surgeons shows a shocking 40cm long freshwater eel still very much intact but very much dead. Dr Li said:
It was already dead. But it caused severe bacterial contamination in his abdomen due to a build-up of faeces and pus. It was only after surgery, when we were enquiring after his medical history, that he told us he used the eel to cure his constipation. He inserted it up his anus into his rectum. I suspect it was then that the perforation in his sigmoid colon occurred.
The doctor urged people not to follow in this mans footsteps as using eels to cure constipation is nothing but a 'folk remedy' and is more than likely to kill you:
Because he had inserted a live eel into himself, the chances of him dying were quite high, had he not had surgery in time.
