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6 doctors swallowed Lego heads for science. Here’s what came out
A rigorous examination
The six doctors devised an experiment, and published the results.
“Each of them swallowed a Lego head,” says science journalist Sabrina Imbler, who wrote about the experiment for The Defector. “They wanted to, basically, see how long it took to swallow and excrete a plastic toy.”
Recently, Sabrina sat down with Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber to chart the journey of six lego heads, and what came out on the other side.
The study excluded three criteria:
A previous gastrointestinal surgery
The inability to ingest foreign objects
An “aversion to searching through faecal matter”—the Short Wave team favorite
Researchers then measured the time it took for the gulped Lego heads to be passed. The time interval was given a Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score.
An important exception
Andy Tagg and his collaborators also wanted to raise awareness about a few types of objects that are, in fact, hazardous to kids if swallowed. An important one is “button batteries,” the small, round, wafer-shaped batteries often found in electronic toys.
“Button batteries can actually burn through an esophagus in a couple of hours,” says Imbler. “So they’re very, very dangerous—very different from swallowing a coin or a Lego head.”
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6 doctors swallowed Lego heads for science. Here’s what came out
As an emergency physician at Western Health, in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Andy Tagg says he meets a lot of anxious parents whose children have swallowed Lego pieces. Much like Andy so many years ago, the vast majority of kids simply pass the object through
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