Dangerous Fads

It seems to be the fashion these days, particularly among young girls, to pierce various parts of the body (including the unmentionable bits) and then sticking metal rings or studs into them. This fad not only looks weird - it can, in some cases, be life threatening - as the following medical report illustrates.

A teenager in Italy complained of stabbing pains in her face. She said they felt like electrical shocks that lasted 10 to 30 seconds and struck 20 to 30 times a day. Her doctors diagnosed trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder sometimes called "suicide disease" because of the excruciating pain it causes.

Doctors tried painkillers, then stronger medication, but in the end, a cure proved more simple: The young woman removed the metal stud from her pierced tongue. Two days later her pain vanished.

This account in the Journal of the American Medical Association is the latest documentation of complications, some life-threatening, linked to tongue piercing. Other problems include tetanus, heart infections, brain abscess, chipped teeth and receding gums. One woman developed so much scar tissue that it resembled what she called a "second tongue".

In the newly reported case, the young Italian woman's mouth jewelry apparently irritated a nerve running along the jaw under her tongue. That nerve is connected to the trigeminal nerve, one of the largest in the head. "There are people who have been dropped to their knees" by trigeminal neuralgia, said a registered nurse and director of patient support for the Trigeminal Neuralgia Association. "That's how intense and how horrendous the pain can be. The teenager is lucky her pain disappeared."

"Certainly, this was an isolated case, an extremely rare complication of this kind of piercing," said Marcelo Galarza, a neurosurgeon at Villa Maria Cecilia Hospital in Ravenna, Italy, who reported the case to the journal. However, he added that the tongue is a dangerous place to pierce because it is rich in blood vessels that can spread infection to major organs and because it is near important nerves and the upper airway.