gastrointestinal reversal during drug rehab??? myth???

i heard through a friend of mine that his cousin once spent a time in a drug rehab center and during his recovery time his intestines began to push backwards so that when he vomited, “poo” would come out his mouth. i didn’t think this was physically possible, but he insists it happened. can this be true, or is he just full of crap himself?

thanks.

Maybe he shouldn’t have stuck food up his butt.

I worked on staff at a drug rehab center for four years and this is news to me. If this “gastrointestinal reversal” occurred, it wasn’t because of his rehab.

And I’ve studied the digestive system for more than 20 years and I’m positive it’s physically impossible.

Vomit comes from the contents of the stomach.

Well, I suppose vomit of a sort comes from “friend of a friend” stories too. Your cousin just proved this. :smiley:

I dunno - a GI bleed with half-digested blood might appear to be excretement-like… but, again, that’s not inherent to the rehab process, that a Major Dysfunction of the body. Alcoholics experience these, I suppose other addicts could, too.

Some years ago a doctor friend of mine, when I asked her how were things going at the hospital, told me about a case as described on the OP, I was quite surprised, but too eeked to ask more. :slight_smile:

Anecdotal and all that, so YMMV; but she wasn´t the kind of person that pulled stuff like that out of her (in this case) mouth; so if she said so, it must have been so.

And now I can´t take out of my head that scene in Austin Powers about the “coffee cup”…

shudders

Unless there is an anomalous erosion which creates a channel from the bowel to the stomach, people hardly ever vomit material from further down than the duodenum. And there’s nothing about detox that would change this.

I posted at length about the characteristics of human vomitus in response to a similar question a few months back. Feel free to search for said post. :smiley:

QtM, MD

Never heard of that reversal thingie, but I googled on “vomiting feces”, and I found this link:

interesting