kill yourself by biting off your own tongue? I mean I’ve watched too much anime and saw in a couple of them people trying to kill themselves by biting off their own tongue. Would you really bleed to death from that?
No, if you had normal coagulation and were alert enough to avoid inhaling the blood. It would be messy but not lethal.
Just an EMT
Just a survivor
I had to go in for stitches because the bleeding wouldn’t stop. And i tried to stop it for hours before going in, 4 stitches (hurt like hell)
And painful. It would be very painful. (I bit a hole thru my tongue in a plane crash years ago. It really really hurt. A lot.)
Can you see how it’s still lopsided, even now?
Hypothetically, if a person was doped up with a ton of aspirin and some sort of anticoagulant, would they be able to exsanguinate by biting off their tongue?
I’m sure even a bottle of aspirin won’t be enough to make the pain bearable, but it and the anticoagulant should at least prevent clotting.
Blech… what a horrible way to attempt suicide.
As a minor hijack - why do tongues have so many pain receptors? About all I can hazard a guess on is so we don’t swallow something sharp like rocks or sticks that would do greater harm in the gut.
If the patient doesn’t clot effectively, they could bleed to death, yes.
Just educated WAGing here, but I’d say its because the tongue is such a highly developed sense organ for most creatures.
Evolutionarily, it developed that way initially more than an organ for helping to ingest food. Using it to taste/smell objects which might be nourishing, but might be poisonous, requires a lot of nerve endings. And sensing pain is an effective way to stop an organism from eating something that causes pain.
Like jagged metal Krusty-O’s?
Would they have to take so much aspirin that that the aspirin itself would kill the person? Not that it matters, the whole thing was that they had no other way to kill themselves(no drugs, knives, or anything) so the idea was to completely bite off the end of the tongue to commit suicide. (Oddly enough the only place I’ve seen this was in a couple of anime shows so I am kind of curious if it was possible and if it’s some sort of Japanese myth or something.)
Are you sure they were trying to kill themselves? In a few anime I’ve seen (adn I’ve seen quite a few) they’ve done it to avoid having to answer questions (i.e. I’m not giving you many verbal answers if my tongue is gone). Granted said characters overlook their ability to write, but usually they’re trying to avoid questoning rather than any attempt at suicide.
Aspirin’s anticoagulation effects aren’t really dose-related, after a certain minimum is taken, and they’re not all that potent in inhibiting clotting when compared to medications like heparin and warfarin. I’d expect that an otherwise healthy person on aspirin would not bleed out from severing their own tongue, in most cases.
While 325 mg of aspirin a day may be a bit more effective in decreasing platelet function than 81 mg a day, there’s no evidence that higher doses of aspirin cause more reductions in platelet function.
Yes, I know I saw it in Vampire Hunter D (where the girl wanted to kill herself to avoid marrying a vampire and pretty much getting raped) and the other was Death Note. (Where the girl had been arrested for murder and been basically been driven half crazy by the ordeal.) The point was both cases they were trying to kill themselves without any weapons, drugs, or anything.
So would that much aspirin even be enough to bleed out from the tongue or is this turning out to be about as probable as killing someone with a blow to the nose? 
A plane crash? Wow! Did you survive?
I thought Misa was just trying to silence herself, so they couldn’t question her about the Death Notebook. It came off as though she was trying to kill herself “fine then, I’ll bite my tounge off” is what she said when the Shinigami refused to kill her iirc, but I think she was just trying to make sure she didn’t reveal any info about Light or the Death Note.
No, he’s a zombie.
No it would not.
Aspirin acts on platelets and will prolong your ‘bleeding time’, but it doesn’t have an effect on the clotting cascade.
Also, anatomically there are not any large arteries in the tongue, so it would ooze blood quite a bit, but you wouldn’t be able to exsanguinate.
My impression was that she really wanted to kill herself after being driven half made by L.(I mean he did have her bound, strapped to a board, and blind folded for days. Actually I also thought this kind of showed that L is almost as much of a sociopath as Light is.) So I took it as since Rem wouldn’t kill her she’d kill herself.
Somebody tries it in Samurai X, but fails.
Maggie tried it in “Million Dollar Baby” but failed.
Would losing your tongue actually eliminate your ability to talk once the bleeding is stopped and the pain subsides? I just tried holding down my tongue with my fingers and saying some things. Having my fingers in my mouth certainly sounds like a much bigger impediment to intelligibility than the limited range of motion of the tongue. I mean some consonants are hampered, and it made me sound like a drunk French-Canadian, but I bet it’s still understandable. If it wasn’t almost 2AM and I was wearing clothes I’d go try it with a real human being. On second thought, maybe I should…
Well, right off the bat you wouldn’t be able to make the following sounds correctly: d, j, k, l, n, r, sh, t, y, long e, short i and any diphthongs including them (which is most English diphthongs). I think that would significantly impact one’s communication, but no, it wouldn’t exactly eliminate your ability to talk.