Per this thread this person,and at least one thread participant claims to go weeks (and one person months) without having a bowel movement. Is this nonsense or potentially true?
Wouldn’t you die with all the fecal material accumulating in your system?
In my experience, it’s usually the water that moves, not the bowl. (Although, I guess, the bowl moves, if only in the sense that the earth moves, and, thus, does everything on it.)
I was gonna say “because he’s been using plates,” but the connection back to the toilet thing is better. 
Since this is evidently a specific question about human physiology and metabolism, I’m moving this from IMHO to GQ.
If it veers into the territory of specific medical complaints, the GQ mods can punt it back over to IMHO.
I say he’s full of shit.
I was always under the impression that if a person was not having a bowel movement at least every other day or so there was a problem. I do know that the other form of waste removal is more imperative for your health. If you don’t urinate your kidneys will become damaged and you will die. I am not sure if the same will happen if you don’t have a bowel movement.
I just received a TMI moment. My wife sat next to me, glanced at the thread and proudly proclaimed that at one point she would only “go” once a week with no problems. She claims that it was this way for years. I really didn’t want to know this, now I shall stare straight ahead and ponder.
And I just realized that I am contributing nothing of any relevance to this discussion. Sorry everyone!
I suspect it depends on a combination of diet and bowel motility.
Water and fiber help bulk up the stool making it easier for the bowel to push it through. However, if the person in question has been habitually using or abusing laxatives, they may have lost some of their bowel motility - that is the peristalsis isn’t as strong or regular as it used to be - and that would slow down the stool’s trip through the bowel.
I would imagine if the person in question had healthy gut flora, it wouldn’t be that big of a problem - so long as they were comfortable, didn’t have to strain, and didn’t have sudden urgency. If, however, their gut flora had an over abundance of e. coli, lysteria, or some of the other toxic bacteria, it could get really, really bad.
For the first few months of her life my daughter only had a bowel movement once a week. It worried us for a while, but her doctor said that some kids are just like that.
The evil part of me laughed when the babysitter had the kid during that change. Oh those diapers were a doozy.
First, what is wrong with people who post these things on the Internet? Seriously. I mean, beyond the bowel problem–what is their major malfunction?
Now. My grandmother, in her later years, had to be taken to the ER, who did an x-ray and then somebody had to do a manual, er, cleanout. (She “like to died of embarrassment” but she has been dead for 30 years now so I don’t think I’m disgracing her.) It was a little over three weeks for her and she was very uncomfortable. When all her friends were sitting around discussing their medical problems, she had to just say nothing, because her problem was so humiliating for her. (Had I been the doctor I think I would have drugged her for the procedure, just because.)
Byetta slowed down my digestive tract, apparently that is part of why people have nausea issues when they use it. I could use it for about a year then the nausea issue cropped up badly.
E. coli is not a really toxic bacterium. I read somewhere that 25% of our feces consists of E. coli. There are, of course, toxic strains. Those are new, apparently the result of modern animal husbandry (a combination of overcrowding and indiscriminate use of antibiotics). When I was an undergraduate, working in a lab to pay for college, I used to pipette E. coli using an ordinary pipette. I never swallowed, but it was not considered to be dangerous in any way if I had.
So most strains of E. coli are quite benign. However, the presence of the bacteria in food is taken as evidence of bad handling and is therefore quite negative.
It’s routinely a week or longer for me. Healthy slender male, 39.
Maybe they were taking prenatal vitamins. :mad:
Excessive iron in supplements can make it so pooping is damned near impossible, and when you do go it is quite difficult and almost nothing exits your system. I finally determined the best thing to do is alternate prenatal vitamins so that I only take ones with iron every other day and the others are iron-free because otherwise I was staring down the barrel of 9 poopless months.
In male UK transit workers (IIRC), the 5th and 95th percentile for BM’s were approximately three times per day and once every three days respectively. Now, that was a study from the 1960’s and diets were different then as was ethnic diversity. So, it may not be legit to extrapolate that data to here and now (wherever and whenever that may be).
That thread linked in the OP is awesome - reminds me of mid-nineties alt.tasteless.
Joe
Here’s a thread I started nine years ago about Walter Hudson and his alleged ability to retain his bowels for up to three weeks:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=131451&highlight=hudson
One of the side-effects of Vicodin is apparently severe constipation. I’ve taken Vicodin several times, and not experienced that particular issue, but I know several people who have.
(Back in the 1990s, when Brett Favre was seriously hooked on Vicodin, I wondered if he ever pooped.)
Of course, drugging her would have just made things worse the next day :p.
My kids both went from “every 2 hours” to “once a week” when they were a couple months old. And as breast-fed babies, those once-a-week diapers were pretty spectacular.
As an adult: I can believe someone might routinely go only once or twice a week but I can’t imagine that it’s good for them. For one thing, higher fiber intake means faster poop motility and supposedly reduces the risk of cancer etc. Also, passing that stool, after it’s had a while to sit and get more and more dehydrated, means more painful passage, higher risk of triggering hemorrhoids / fissures, etc.
As a resident I once was called for an urgent consult on a pediatric patient (maybe 7 or 8 y.o.) who was already in the OP having tympanostomy tubes put in. The boy was under general anesthesia, and at the end of the case the nurse taking the drapes off the table noticed that the patient had a large, protuberant, lumpy belly. The ENT docs felt his abdomen and were afraid that there might be a huge tumor there and wanted to know if we (peds surgery) wanted to take a peek in his abdomen as long as he was already asleep.
Long story short, I disimpacted four heaping emesis basins worth of poop from the lad - the poor kid must have been miserable for weeks. I hope the pain relief from the disimpaction was worth the sore b-hole. His parents had no idea that he hadn’t been pooping.
Supposedly (suppositorily?) that’s true of heroin too.