A Coin Stuck in Throat Can Be Pushed Down

A "coin stuck in the throat" headline is not likely what you would expect on a coin news site, but it’s a subject that nevertheless is serious and likely provokes at least some extra interest to coin collectors. It did at least for me…

Having had the unwelcome experience of watching a family member choke on a small object and then get rushed to the emergency room, it seems logical for medical procedures to focus on retrieving throat-lodged objects by pulling them back out through the mouth. But that’s not always the case with stuck coins, nor should it be according to new research findings.

For coins lodged in a child’s throat, a research team from the Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis found that the length of hospital stays and their resulting expenses were reduced when coins were pushed into a child’s stomach by emergency staff instead of having them pulled back out through the mouth.

Not only is the medical procedure (called bougienage) usually friendlier to the patient, the findings reported no later complications.

Who would have thought coins could enter the digestive system and then later passed out in the "natural" way?

The Reuters article describing the findings are embedded below.