Hello!
I am growing quite fond of this forum. Today I had a weird dream, where I was at a hospital. A doctor was talking about a reverse digestive system. I am not sure, but I think my brain just made up a surgery where the digestive system is flipped 180 degrees - so the exit is on the mouth and the entrance is on the anus. Therefore, the person would have to shove the food up and would expel feces through his/her mouth. I know this would be highly illegal… but would it be remotely possible?
If it’s remotely possible, I’m starting a petition right now to make it illegal.
Sounds like a sequel to The Human Centipede if you ask me.
Well Ive known some doctors who had a cerebrorectal shunt malfunction.
Not remotely possible.
The surgery necessary to perform it would be hugely invasive and traumatic, if even possible without leaving something unconnected.
The human digestive system is assisted by gravity.
And expelling feces from the throat would probably cause some nasty respiratory complications, if nothing else.
“Maybe if you put food up your butt…you would crap out your mouth.” - Cartman, South Park
Didn’t he say “shit”? Wasn’t that the episode where they counted how many times they could say “shit” in one episode, without being censored or bleeped? Maybe I’m conflating two episodes.
Anyway, that’s what I thought of when I read the OP. I suspect the OP saw this episode at some point and this just stuck in his head.
Roddy
You’re conflating two episodes. The one where they counted up all the times they could say “shit” was the first episode of season 5, “It Hits the Fan,” and it aired in June 2001. The mouth-pooping episode was “Red Hot Catholic Love,” season 6 episode 8, airing in July 2002 (and it turned out the whole reverse-food subplot was just a way of insulting atheists by having Father Maxi say at the end that when people don’t have religion to guide them, “they just start spewing a bunch of crap out of their mouths.”)
WHY ? If it works upside down, why wouldn’t it work the correct way around ?
Yes, remotely possible.
I suppose the subject would become good at inducing vomitting to get the remaining excrement out of his oesophagus (without it going down into his lungs.)
Cough cough cough… "Sorry I thought it was just a fart…burp … I meant burp. ".
Perhaps.you’re oversimplifying the anatomy of the gastrointestinal system. It’s not just a tube that runs mouth, oesophagus, stomach, a few extra bits like the duodenum, small intestine, large intestine, rectum, daylight again. It’s not independent of nearby body parts. The oesophagus evolved to coexist with the trachea, for example. You put a rectum there and get constipated and you crush the trachea, to give a silly example.
But the same is true of other body part relationships. The liver, gall bladder, pancreas, and kidneys are where ther are so they have close access and communication with the bowel. You drag all that up into the chest, and you have to move the lungs somewhere else. But the lungs are dependent on the ribs and the diaphragm to work, leaving aside all the other impossibilities in moving them.
Most importantly, the bowels have fixed enervation and vascularisation. You can’t just cut all the nerves (as would be necessary) and expect the bowels to work. And the vascularisation of the bowels is achieved by organs called mesenteries, which are large curtain or fan like structures attached along the length of the bowels and plumbed elsewhere into the vascular system. Trying to disconnect the bowels from their mesenteries is not compatible with life; trying to brute force twist the bowels into reverse can’t be done - the connecting structures are not made for it.
Takeaway - the body is hugely complex and interconnected at the microscopic, macroscopic and biochemical level. It is not a meccano set. This is why the grand operations like liver and heart transplants are almost miraculous in that they can be done at all. They are not like dropping in a new clutch in the family banger.
Exactly. It’s possible that a person might survive a short time after being hacked about in such a way, but not a meaningfully long time (i.e. not long enough to heal) and there’s no chance of the digestive system doing anything useful in that time.