This Doctor Is Urging People To Stop Using Metal Grill Brushes, And Here’s Why
With spring and summer right around the corner, some people are super excited to bring out their grills and start barbecuing.
However, there is one grilling tool that people should avoid, as doctors are emphasizing just how dangerous they can be.
Dr. Meghan Martin (@beachgem10), a pediatric ER doctor and TikTok creator, recently went viral after telling the story of one of the most interesting cases she’s seen on the job. It concerns a young boy, ear pain, and a grill tool. Can you guess what it is before the end of her story?
A 4-year-old boy entered Meghan’s hospital one day with extreme ear pain. Earlier that day, he was eating a hamburger at a barbecue when he suddenly started crying while grabbing his ear.
In the ER, he had an ear exam which came back completely normal. The doctor suggested that he takes ibuprofen and go to an ENT if the pain didn’t go away within two days.
The pain hadn’t subsided, so two days later, the boy was taken to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, otherwise known as an ENT.
The ENT did an exam which also looked normal. He was sent home with some ear-numbing drops and was told to keep taking ibuprofen.
Nothing was getting better for this poor boy, so his parents took him back to the ER. They decided to do a CAT scan of his mastoid, which is located just behind the ear.
The scan was taken without contrast, and no one could see anything wrong. Once again, he was referred to the ENT and a pediatrician.
rh2010 – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
It had been between 7-10 days since his first visit to the ER when the boy’s condition started to worsen. So he arrived at the ER for a third visit at 4:30 am while Meghan was working.
“Now he’s having some fevers, and he’s not wanting to eat and drink,” explains Meghan. “We have no idea what’s going on with him.”
Meghan gave the boy a throat exam and noticed that he had some swelling near his right tonsil. He was also experiencing tenderness on the right side of his neck and still complained of ear pain.
Now that the new symptoms had appeared, Meghan explains that she and the other staff went “all out,” ordering a CAT scan of his neck area, including his ears, with contrast this time. They also ran a bunch of labs on him and ran every test they could think of.
“We got our answer on the CAT scan,” says Meghan.
Can you guess what was causing this little boy so much pain?
He had a two-centimeter-long metal wire lodged into his peritonsillar tissue on the right side. It caused an abscess to develop.
As it turns out, that small wire was a piece of a metal grill brush that must have fallen onto the grill his hamburger was cooked on all those days ago.
The metal bristle fell off the brush while the grill was being cleaned, stayed on the grill, and got cooked into the hamburger meat.
ENT surgeons operated on the boy, removing the wire and draining the abscess. He was given antibiotics, and his pain had gone away completely.
“Do not use grill brushes with metal wires,” says Meghan at the end of her video.
Meghan warns that if you clean your grill with metal grill brushes, you not only run the risk of someone getting it lodged in their soft tissue, but loose bristles can also cause bowel obstructions and perforations.
A 2016 study from the Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery journal shows that approximately 1,700 Americans had to go to the emergency room after accidentally ingesting wire grill brush bristles between 2002-2014.
That may not sound like that many people, but that is only counting emergency room visits. One in four of those people had to be admitted to a hospital. Since then, grill brush incidents have kept on happening.
Some safe alternatives to using wire grill brushes are nylon brushes, scrubbing a grill with half of an onion, and using baking soda and a damp cloth.
Did you ever think grill brushes could cause such damage?
@beachgem10 One of my most interesting cases has a lesson that could save your life! #case #medicine #interesting #summer #ent
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