I quickly looked it up (by the way, does anyone know a better online dictionary than dictionary.com- I’m often unimpressed). Dictionary.com redirected me here.
Now my initial thoughts were that this must be a metaphorical term (like coprocephaly) for someone who “talks shit”, but since the term is listed on a medical site I grew morbidly curious. The only further explanation given was:
Now use of the word appearance again suggests that the term may be metaphorical, but the mention of the distal small bowel and colonic obstruction have me thinking it might not just be a clever name.
So, what’s the deal? Can people vomit actual fecal matter? What would lead to this?
I have heard of this - medical students take great joy in telling true tales of the human body to gross you out.
It’s apparently caused by, as your cite says, a blockage in the small bowel or colon. If there’s a blockage between the part of the bowel where digested food can start to be called poo, and the anus, that poo ain’t going out the back door. It’s going to have to turn round and make its way out of the front door. Your cite refers to the distal small bowel, that means the end of the small bowel that’s further from the stomach and nearer to the rectum.
Vastly unpleasant, but can be fixed if action is taken to unblock the bowel. Apparently.
I hope someone medical checks in with information better than something I heard second hand from some student medic.
Ever coughed up a tonsilith? These are small beigy-yellow globs of food that became logdged in the crevices of the tonsils. They literally smell like shit.
My father-in-law had this problem shortly before he died. Very unpleasant for us. Luckily, I think he was far-gone enough that he probably didn’t realize what was happening.
Back in a previous life I worked in a hospital where I personally saw this happen. It was explained that the patient (who was very sick anyway) had a bowel obstruction and, as Tansu said, the poo had to go somewhere.
We see it in veterinary medicine sometimes, too, but in our patients it’s generally not caused by bowel obstruction. Animals are disgusting, what can I say?
The obstruction is pretty far along the alimentary canal…matter had to take the long and winding road to come to a dead end, then just back it into reverse.
I suppose colonic irrigation or forceps at the end of an endoscope would dislodge the thingy.
The last time this came up on the boards, I seem to recall that the consensus was that this was not, in fact, due to a blockage in the nether regions, as that would require the material to backtrack through too much tubing and too many sphincters to be plausible, but that rather it was a result of certain bacteria, normally restricted to the lower G.I., taking hold in the stomach.
Lets examine this logically: for this to hapen, we’d have to see material from the far side of the small intestine (at least) make its way back up the small intestine (which normally simply can’t happen), enter the stomach, then somehow back up into the esophagus, which can only happen if you start hurling.
I really don’t think so. Even if you ahd some sort of blockage, the material at the far end would simply get stuck; it would surely have more food on top of it, all of which would have to come out first.
Like Chronos, I too was thinking that this was disproved in a previous thread here and that while the thrown up material might have looked like poo and smelled like poo but that it indeed was not poo but some vile substance due to everything getting backed up. Like the bandit mentioned, that’s a lot of reverse movement to occur requiring abnormal coordination among numerous different organs, pipes, valves, etc.
Were it to be true though, how would you announce the event… “Man, I gotta pinch a vomit”?
I’ve coughed up “small beigy-yellow globs” before, but I never noticed any particular odor to them. Since I’ve only ever noticed it happening when I’ve had extremely long hair I’d chalked them up as bezoars, at least after reading that article by The Master.
Maybe not true poo, but remember that the digestive system is geared to move things along. Along the way different digestive emzimes and bacteria are added to extract nutriants.
Now if there is a blockage and the pipe backs up all the way to the stomach, it would make sense that the normal motion of the system would, unable to push things along, mix things very well. So the digestive emzines and bacteria along with some ‘poo’ will eventually mix throughout the system and into the stomach.
Now you don’t just have poo in the stomach, but all the emzines and bacteria to make poo out of new food. And I’m sure even if it’s only 10% poo, the person will take it as all poo.
