American woman buys tapeworm pills for weight loss. How dangerous are they? – Firstpost

Obesity is hard to escape.

A peculiar case of a woman who took tapeworm egg pills as a quick-fix solution to lose weight has come to light.

Doctors said she ended up with a devastating illness and warned about the practice of consuming tapeworm pills.

Tapeworms are parasites that, once swallowed, can make a home in the gut and grow up to 30 feet while consuming the hosts.

Let’s take a look.

What happened?

A 21-year-old Iowa resident, referred to as TE, reportedly bought capsules filled with tapeworm eggs using cryptocurrency.

Dr Bernard Hsu, a US-based oncologist who reported the case study on his YouTube channel, said that she was struggling to lose weight with diet and exercise, prompting her to opt for the controversial method on the dark web.

“TE was intrigued. A ‘forbidden’ method must be so good, and so powerful, that it’s the one true secret that she needs to know,” Hsu said.

She initially took two tapeworm tablets and got the results she wanted.

However, within a week she began suffering from episodes of stomach cramps and bloating.

Because she was happy about the weight loss, the woman dismissed her symptoms.

The happiness didn’t stay long, according to Dr Hsu, TE began worrying after a shocking incident in her bathroom.

“She thought she could feel something flapping and slapping around her cheeks while she was sitting down. When she was about to flush, she looked back and saw some tan, rectangular pieces floating around in the bowl creeping out of the bulk mass.”

Within a few days, more symptoms like an unusual lump under her chin, passing out, intense headaches, and cranial pressure, apart from severe abdominal pain, appeared.

After it became unbearable, she got herself tested for a bacterial infection, which came back negative — but with some more symptoms.

“She would have periods in time where she’d suddenly wake up in the middle of the day and she couldn’t remember anything from the last few hours,” Dr Hsu said.

The doctors found multiple lesions across her brain and other parts of the body – including tongue and liver.

She then revealed her dangerous diet.

The doctors treating her found TE had ingested two species of the parasite — Taenia saginata and Taenia solium — which released the eggs into her bloodstream, causing infection.

Two medications were prescribed to TE to treat her infestation: one that paralysed the worms and caused them to separate from the intestine, and another that deprives them of the glucose necessary for survival.

They also prescribed her steroids to lower the level of inflammation in her brain and hopefully allow her body to clear the eggs, though this couldn’t be guaranteed.

In any case, after three weeks in the hospital, tests showed no evidence of eggs in her brain, and she was released.

According to the most recent information on TE at the six-month follow-up, she seemed to be experiencing no new symptoms and was healthily losing weight.

‘In an able-bodied human, weight loss with diet and exercise is physically doable, and that has much less risk than letting extra organisms intentionally live inside of you,’ he said.

What is a tapeworm diet?

The tapeworm diet is where a pill containing a tapeworm egg is swallowed.

When the egg eventually hatches, the tapeworm will grow inside the body and eat whatever one is eating. The idea is that one can eat whatever one wants and still lose weight.

However, this only works in theory.

This type of diet is the same as a harmful tapeworm infection.

According to experts, when a tapeworm hatches in your intestine, it begins to feed off your body’s nutrients and grow by reproducing from the proglottids – the chain-looking body of the tapeworm.

Advertisements for pills containing “sanitised” “easy to swallow” tapeworm eggs with “no ill effects” date back to the Victorian era, when people first started intentionally eating tapeworms to lose weight.

But in the 1800s, advertising laws weren’t quite as strict as they are now. Whether the products indeed included tapeworm eggs or if this was merely an instance of astute marketing has been contested by certain historians.

Today, the Food and Drug Administration has banned these pills, however, there are many sources that scam people.

Moreover, intentional infection with tapeworms for weight loss is rare, only a handful of such cases have been recorded in places like the US and Hong Kong, according to Dailymail.

What are its symptoms?

The main risk of the infection associated with a tapeworm is that you have no control over where it attaches itself, which could cause major harm to tissues or organs outside of your digestive tract.

It leads to unpleasant symptoms like:

• Diarrhoea

• Severe stomachache

• Nausea

• Weakness

• Fever

• Bacterial infections

• Neurological issues

Is it dangerous?

Very. In some cases, even death.

Dangerous complications of a tapeworm diet include:

• Blockage of bile ducts, appendix, or pancreatic duct

• Neurocysticercosis is a complication of the brain and nervous system which causes dementia and vision issues.

• Disruption in organ functions, including the lungs and liver.

With inputs from agencies