pica

There's this fascinating childhood psychiatric disorder called pica, which is basically the continuous ingestion of non-food items. It's commonly a dual diagnosis (mental retardation + mental illness). Children who have pica tend to develop one of my favourite words in the English language, bezoars. Basically a bezoar is a mass of something that cannot pass through the digestive system. An example is a phytotrichobezoar, which is what it sounds like if you break the latin down: Phyto refers to something plantlike (seeds, skins of fruits, vegetables), tricho meaning hair, and bezoar - a mass of plant+hair in the GI tract.

Obviously, children with pica have the potential to develop some lifethreatening gastro illnesses, but what's curiously interesting is that pica is a strong predictor for bulimia nervosa later in life. Why eating weird non-foods would translate to binge eating + compensatory mechanism is beyond me, but it's statistically significant. I could understand if it led to binge eating disorder (currently eating disorder NOS until DSM-V comes out), what with it being an impulse control issue, but this doesn't seem to be the case.


This guy liked to eat coins.

Here's a beauty, a giant trichobezoar being removed on operation of an 18 year old with pica. Not for the faint of heart.