Indian Man Got Addicted To Eat Knives

In an unusual case, a team of five doctors have removed 40 knives from a man’s stomach in a five-hour long surgery in Amritsar, India. 

Image Credit: Dinesh Dubey/Barcroft

The patient, Surjeet Singh(40), who is employed with Punjab police, had come to hospital complaining of severe abdominal pain and excessive weight loss.

CT Scan

A series of ultrasounds followed by various tests, including endoscopy and CT scan, revealed sharp knife-like objects in stomach. The patient then claimed that he always had an urge to eat knives and he swallowed them over a period of two months.

Surgeons said they found knives of up to seven inches in length, some folded, others not and some rusty. With the knives’ blades exposed, the man was bleeding profusely and he could not have survived much longer.

Doctors took two days to come up with a surgical plan of action prior to operating. The patient is now "out of danger" and is set to be discharged in a couple of days.

In fact, there is a condition called Pica, which is the compulsive eating of nonnutritive substances and can have serious medical implications. Although it has been described since antiquity, there has been no single agreed-upon explanation of the cause of such behavior.