A tiny camera that was supposed to film a man's small intestine ended up sending back pictures of his windpipe. Doctors in China reported that the 69-year-old patient started coughing the moment he swallowed a capsule endoscope, and the device's own live video soon showed the ringed cartilage of an airway rather than the lining of his gut.
The capsule had been inhaled and was stuck in his right intermediate bronchus, one of the main air passages feeding the right lung. Coughing, changes in body position, and chest tapping all failed to move it, so lung specialists retrieved it with a bronchoscope under general anesthesia. The case, published in November 2024 in Frontiers in Medicine by doctors at the Affiliated Hospital of Qingdao University, comes with a review of two decades of similar mishaps that points to who may be most vulnerable. A second case reported in Japan in 2026 shows the problem is still turning up.
