Staple lodges in man’s face after a teeth cleaning exercise goes wrong: case report
Doctors initially failed to see the item and a month later the patient returned with intermittent pain but no 'telltale' inflammation.
ENT surgeons have highlighted the challenges of diagnosing foreign bodies retained in the oral cavity, after a young man lost track of a staple he had used to clean his teeth.
The 2cm-long staple was eventually extracted from the patient’s submandibular gland a month after it got accidentally lodged, according to a case report.
But other than intermittent pain on the floor of his mouth, he was asymptomatic, said the doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.
“This case highlights that not all foreign bodies cause inflammatory reactions as a telltale sign of their presence,” they wrote in BMJ Case Reports.
