Is That a Bezoar in Your Pocket...?

Insane people are cool. Who else would systematically pull out their hair, eat it, and end up with that thing (pictured above) lodged in their stomach? And all for MY entertainment.

That thing is called a trichobezoar. Tricho = hair. Bezoar = nasty mass of indigestible stuff. We get these with reasonable frequency in the pathology lab. The one you see above, you may have noted, is cast in the shape of a stomach. Those who eat their hair are said to suffer the from the so-called “Rapunzel syndrome”. I’m trying to figure out a catchy name for those who eat their own pubic hair.

Hair is not the only material we get. I have seen phytobezoars (plants), plasticbagobezoars, paperclipobezoars and CornNut®obezoars (OK, I made that last one up – shockingly, the other ones I did not).

This came up recently on a scalp biopsy from a young woman with patchy baldness. “Well, of course”, you are probably thinking, “could be telogen effluvium, alopecia areata, like ya know, wha-eva’”. Well, I diagnosed trichotrillomania, or, for the non-medical types, freakshow-who-pulls-out-her-own-hair. Maybe I’m being too critical. Maybe Head-and-Shoulders tastes like fucking maple syrup. So I apologize for the offense I have caused. Go ahead and eat that plastic shopping bag from Wal-Mart. Who am I to judge.