In 2018, a question burned in the minds of six pediatric healthcare professionals: How long does it take for a small ingested object to pass through a

An Oral History Of The Time Six Doctors Swallowed Lego Heads To See How Long They’d Take To Poo

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2023-01-27 07:00:05

In 2018, a question burned in the minds of six pediatric healthcare professionals: How long does it take for a small ingested object to pass through a child's digestive system? Unwilling to ask actual children to experimentally swallow a foreign object, these skilled workers volunteered their own gastrointestinal tracts for science, and published a paper detailing their experiment in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, which went viral in a way that papers published in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health usually do not. On that fateful day, on opposite sides of the globe in the United Kingdom and Australia, the six each swallowed a Lego head and waited for the plastic noggins to meander through their large intestines and emerge, triumphant, in a toilet bowl. Five of the pediatricians recovered their Lego heads in a matter of days. One pediatrician never recovered his Lego head. This is their story.

It all started with one pediatrician at a conference, wishing more people had come to his lecture. Andrew "Andy" Tagg was speaking to an audience at a local children's hospital in Australia. He decided to talk about about the danger of swallowing or ingesting foreign bodies, a topic he'd chosen as a way to talk about recent high-profile cases involving children swallowing button batteries. The tiny batteries can get stuck in and severely burn the esophagus within two hours, which can lead to major injury or death.

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