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Side note, I think there is something way off in:

>Henry: We get people to swallow pill cameras all the time in our gastro department, and they're bigger than that. The numbers that we'd learned, although I'd learned as part of my pediatric training around what you will and won't pass and where the danger zones are, is that if something's greater than 110 millimeters, then it won't get around your duodenum.

110 mm is large, it is roughly 4 inches!

I doubt that something 110 mm in any of the three dimensions (apart maybe something like a piece of string) can be actually swallowed.

It cannot be 11 mm (as the lego head is about that size, and doesn't look like being near the "limit").



You got me to measure my jaw opening out of curiosity, and it doesn't open further than maybe 60mm (left-right) and 40mm (teeth to teeth).

I'm not sure I want to see someone opening their mouth wide enough to get anything 110mm diameter into it, much less swallow it.

EDIT: Maybe he meant something rigid 110mm in any dimension (so stick, for example)?


110mm is roughly the size of a popsicle stick. I guess you could swallow it if you tried hard enough...


Surely, but I don't want to try, historically there is the Chevalier Jackson collection:

https://muttermuseum.org/exhibitions/chevalier-jackson-colle...

that has many interesting items, including spoons and keys, that are about that size.

I could only find a picture of some of these on a Lancet article:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

There are reports of even bigger/longer objects, such as a tootbrush (8 inch/20 cm long):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3080583/

but they are recorded as exceptional, I was initially thinking of something loosely spherical, in that case it is more probably something less than 20 mm or 4/5 of an inch in size/diameter that can be ingested, bar the exceptional cases.

But all these recorded items seem like having needed to be removed, I couldn't find anything about something (say) 100 mm long that managed to "pass through" naturally.




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