A 64-year-old man got a medical checkup after his tongue began sprouting green "hairs." The bizarre-looking fuzz turned out to be caused by a fairly common and harmless condition known as hairy tongue.
The patient's tongue had turned green about two weeks before he visited the clinic, shortly after he had completed a course of antibiotics for a gum infection. When the discoloration initially appeared, doctors suspected a case of oral thrush, a kind of fungal infection, and prescribed an antifungal treatment, but this did nothing to curtail the moss-like growths.
