A 14-year-old boy went for imaging after an injury left him with foot pain, and doctors spotted a small, bony structure near his pelvis that seemed to fit the story. It looked like a fragment of bone that had been torn loose. It was not. The boy had been born with what doctors call a pelvic digit, an extra finger-shaped bone sitting in the soft tissue beside the pelvis.
His case and that of a 40-year-old man appear in a report published August 18 in Cureus, whose title calls the anomaly a silent guest in the body. The authors argue that recognizing it can spare patients unnecessary treatment.
