A 33-year-old mother of three had lived with whitish vaginal discharge for months but felt too ashamed to see a doctor. After watching a social media video that recommended potash alum as a home remedy, an idea a family friend also endorsed, she applied alum fragments around the vaginal opening and inserted pieces into her vagina.
Over the next three days, she developed severe lower abdominal pain, worsening vulval swelling and difficulty walking, and she went to an emergency department in Kathmandu, Nepal. What doctors found was serious enough that vulvovaginal cancer was among the first possibilities they considered. Clinicians at Shree Birendra Hospital and the Nepalese Army Institute of Health Sciences described the case in a report in the Bulletin of the National Research Centre, published Sept. 16.
