A 6-year-old boy arrived at a Saudi Arabian emergency department drooling and complaining of chest pain about four hours after swallowing a coin. X-rays showed it wedged in the lower part of his esophagus, a situation that often ends with a child under general anesthesia for endoscopic removal. Instead, doctors gave him a small dose of olive oil and let him drink as much water as he wanted. An hour later, the coin was out of his esophagus.
The case, published September 4 in Frontiers in Pediatrics by physicians at King Saud Medical City in Riyadh, is the first pediatric report of oral olive oil used this way, according to the authors' search of medical databases. They are careful to call it hypothesis-generating, not proof that the oil works.
