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Man Takes Up Internal Farming
RockDoctor writes "'A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.' Just that summary should tell you enough to work out most of the rest of the details, but it does raise a number of questions unaddressed by the article: How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system? What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated? I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company."
I knew I shouldn't have eaten the seeds to give myself an edge in all those watermelon eating contests :(
I remember as a young kid being vaguely scared that, if I ate watermelon seeds, a watermelon would grow in my stomach. Of course, by the time I was six I realized that plants would not grow inside a human. Turns out I was wrong.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Unpealievable!
I assume that if it went untreated it would have just died and either been absorbed or caused a nasty infection.
There is a similar case of a pine tree in a lung.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
...not to inhale my food. Guess she was right.
This Farmville player is asking you for a PEA IN HIS LUNG for his farm!
Kriston
a 'Lung'gume.
Hmmm Hmmm. see what I did there.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1731#comic
Just when you thought you could trust the plants....
... apparently it was only discovered when he went for an unrelated consultation with a podiatrist.
Raw ripe peas are almost as hard as stones and indigestible (it takes soaking for a day and cooking for at least half an hour before the are edible (there are breeds of pea which can be eaten raw, but only the very young unripe fruits, which would not germinate)). I'd like to know what he really did.
It's not. That's why it's in Idle.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
"How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system? What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated? I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company." I highly doubt any company wants to use him for PR, but Monsanto may be looking into how to sue him for patent infringement, since he apparently took their patented herbicide resistant strains and modified them to be antibody resistant.
Chew, dammit!
Nah, they'd just sue him and force him to commit seppuku.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
...LOL you have a filthy, filthy mind.
Seriously I knew a girl who developed a severe earache a few weeks after her honeymoon to Yellowstone and saw the doctor about it. He looked in her ear with an otoscope and saw something sticking out from behind her eardrum. It was a germinating seed that had lodged in her ear wax and taken root behind her eardrum. The theory was that the seed blue in during a particularly windy, dusty day during the Yellowstone trip.
I remember putting a spieces of peas in glasses of water as a child, and they sprouted roots even though they had no nutrients. Presumably they carry a reserve in themselves to kick-start the process, as they well can't get nutrients without a root system?
Emotions! In your brain!
...he's achieved inner peas?
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
I was watching one of the weird science documentaries my wife loves and saw one that beats this story by a bit. Jasper Lawrence had severe asthma and allergies and heard an old wives tale that hookworms could force the body's immune system to "cure" the allergies...so he went to Africa, stamped around in feces and got a nice case of hookworm. It worked.
Now, he has set up a business selling hookworms he harvests from his own feces.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
So this is what happens when you give peas a chance?
Since plants give off oxygen, if this had gotten large enough, he could have had a self sustaining oxygen supply without the need to breathe air...
I thought this was going to be an article about the guy who raises hookworms in his own body and sells them on the Internet.
How did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system?
They didn't have to. The immune system is largely inactive in and oblivious to the airspace of the lung. It would only be when the roots breached the walls and entered the blood that the immune system would get wise.
What would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated?
If it had continued to grow and tore a hole in the lung he could have got infection-like symptoms (fevers and aches as the body ramped up production of leukocytes).
If it had died it would become food for bacteria in the air, and it would have decayed in situ. That would have made a gooey mess.
It gave him what TFA called emphysema, or maybe they meant he really has a prior diagnosis for emphysema so he thought this was more of that and didn't do anything with it until it became acute.
He probably would also have contracted (or had and they weren't reporting) a bad case of pneumonia. The more stuff in your lungs that isn't lung, the easier that is.
BTW, BT, DT, and there's not much better in life than to get a result of "it's not cancer it's something weird" when your lungs hurt.
bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company.
Or a lawsuit waiting for him from the trademark-trolling division of Archer-Daniels Midland, for using their logo in his x-rays without paying a royalty.
Lung....
Lunnnnnnggggg....
Lovely, woody word....lunnnnnggg...
"I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in PR for a pea-growing company."
Green Giant Vegetables, of course.
Ho ho ho.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Don't want zombies in my lung ....
to not inhale his supper!
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Not quite. but they will sue him and demand he return all infringing material -- meaning the seed, plants, harvested crop... and the lung they're attached to.
Mendel meets Mengele
http://www.acetonestudio.com
With my daughter gunning for a major in Environmental Science, my first thought was, "What is the optimal design for generating sufficient food for one, four, 100, and 20K humans?" Besides the obvious answer of, "Planet Earth".
This is how Mendel died.
So now we're just re-posting old shit from every other news source? I read this on the BBC News feed a couple of days ago, and it's been banging around since well before then.
http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/12001910794327/man-finds-plant-growing-inside-his-lung/ (8/9)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10945050 (8/11)
WTF???
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Soylent Peas are People!
Turns out it's a GMO round-up ready pea mutant. Monsanto is suing him for using their genetic material without paying for it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Did he step in Meteor Shit, by any chance?
Some thirty years ago I've heard of a guy that was in his forties and had had a section of spruce branch discovered in his lung. He claimed that he "swallowed" this small secton when he was a toddler.
The needles on the branch were still green on discovery!
What are all these pods doing here?
This is more freaky the more I look at it. I'm not sure which is freakier - that your gf/w/so seems to use terminology like that, or that you seem to have swallowed it (the terminology), ummm, whole and un-diluted.
Then again, you might be taking the piss.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Where are Mulder & Scully when you need them?
I know someone with multiple sclerosis/MS, and there are some legitimate studies of this sort of thing going on related to MS and other autoimmune diseases. Apparently there was some sort of study done in south america where the control group had multiple relapses (MS attacks) but the group with intestinal parasites had basically none over the course of the study. That's prompted further studies involving pig whipworms (which don't thrive and reproduce in humans), along with the obvious investigations of the mechanisms involved. I believe the same thing is also being looked at for Crohn's.
fencepost
just a little off
This was known since 1947, including treatment. Prestigious French botanist Floris Vian describes such a case in his work where a water lily grown into a lung was almost successfully treated by surrounding the patient with flowers. Unfortunately they ran so much out of funds that even the roof of the building collapsed. So in this case they should have surrounded him with lots of vegetables.