I really expected this to be overblown clickbait, but the article delivers on the title about as well as it could. I have seen many more breathless articles on treatments that weren't already conducting human safety trials as well as having animal effectiveness trials concluded.
And yeah, it turns out that mammals can absorb oxygen through their butts. Weird
I know that rectal rehydration is a good method when sterile IV fluids are not available. Hopefully it's much safer than current ventilator or ECMO treatments.
Not really. Said tissues are well vascularized and therefore lend themselves to oxygen exchange. It’s just that the lungs are especially efficient for this.
it pretty common. a lot of people in my high school did this, or froze beer and inserted it to get rapidly wasted. the other classic is the tampon soaked in vodka
most of this was just done because drinks were too expensive or hard to get for high schoolers and they had to optimise their alcohol supplies
Don't treat an anecdote on the Internet like it actually happened. There have been people posting that they had friends of friends in college do this for twenty years. OP never did it but it definitely happened.
In this case it's high schoolers, half of whom most likely have no sexual experience but are fully willing to explore their anal cavity, having access to alcohol but not that much access.
They can get drunk off small amounts of alcohol, but it's such a small ration that they are freezing and destroying their limited amount of beer (which most high schoolers hate) to shove up their butts, to get drunk slightly faster? How much frozen beer can one butt fit? Is it really that much better than holding your nose and pounding it in front of your friends? Are high schoolers really going to parties with beer in their butts to maybe get a buzz of two beers from one butt beer because they only have access to one twelve pack, instead of just telling everyone how they are so wasted instead?
Not to mention the freezing point of ethanol is about -20 F. Just touching beer frozen solid enough to insert is going to instantly freeze surface water. You'd get your buttcicle maybe a quarter of the way in and it's going to start tearing layers of flesh off. I imagine it would make for hilarious fun party times.
As a guy who was gotten to by some male abusers as a child, I was simultaneously laughing uncontrollably and shutting my sphincter like a bank vault door as I read this. Never experienced anything like this before.
The answer to the most important question is at the end of the article. They demonstrated that this is safe, not that it’s effective.
> “This is the first human data and the results are limited solely to demonstrating the safety of the procedure and not its effectiveness,” said co-author Takanori Takebe of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the University of Osaka in Japan. “But now that we have established tolerance, the next step will be to evaluate how effective the process is for delivering oxygen to the bloodstream.”
If it’s proven to be effective and can help avoid ventilators for (at least some) people, it would be a huge breakthrough and improvement in the quality of life for the patient and for their close ones.
My mother is currently dying in the hospital with breathing problems. I mentioned this to her earlier today... I thought this would have been much farther along than it is. Hurry up with the medical tech already!
- what's the actual oxygen carrying capacity? If they're up to human trials then I imagine they've already validated this step in animals
- can it also scrub CO2?
Without doing more research, I'm putting most of the probability mass into it being be a small but significant oxygenation aid. Not enough to let us survive without working lungs, but enough to push the odds in emergency situations, while also being harmless. Something like 5% extra survivability for a $100 cost and a sore butt. Well worth it, but not a revolution.
I wonder if, given that our intestines can absorb gasses into our blood stream, if that also means we readily absorb our farts into our blood stream as well? The chemical composition of them could be having effects on your whole system maybe?
The answer is probably yes and they eventually get exhaled through the lungs or metabolized by various tissues. Gives whole new meaning to 'carrying the fart' though.
If this was enough to temporarily replace breathing I wonder how that would feel if you were otherwise healthy. I imagine not breathing would instinctively feel quite strange and even distressing.
It would be quite distressing because of the accumulation of CO2 in the blood, even with completely adequate oxygenation delivered intrarectally. The slight change in acid-base balance is what makes a person feel the need to breathe, and CO2 is an acidic byproduct of metabolism. This is why people with metabolic acidosis (e.g. in diabetic ketoacidosis or sepsis) have an increased respiratory rate.
Would CO2 still build up if someone isn't breathing at all? I'm guessing so, since you say CO2 is a byproduct of metabolism. Alternatively, could respiration exhaust enough CO2 even in a situation where the lungs are too damaged to take in sufficient oxygen?
All that apart, I'm guessing this would be used in emergency situations, where a patient is likely already unconscious and could be kept under sedation until transferred to ECMO. Is CO2 buildup dangerous on its own? If so, in what kind of time-frame? What's the upper limit on the additional minutes this therapy could buy?
In my thoracic surgery rotations in med school I was taught that the strongest stimulus for increasing the respiratory drive was the acidification of cerebrospinal fluid. Which, of course, correlates with the blood pH. This information comes from some studies in the 60s with goats, and the old guard are happy to hang their hat on it.
There are also chemoreceptors for oxygen concentration in the circulatory system as well.
I think everything you have said is correct, I just wanted to add a few more details for anyone who is interested.
From the littlei know from a breath holding workshop I did awhile ago (for trying to get into freediving) it's the carbon dioxide build up in our blood that gives us the urge to breath, and not the lack of oxygen. If this method allowed for the removal of carbon dioxide from the blood then holding your breath might not even be discomforting.
The acid base balance of the cerebrospinal fluid is the primary driver of the respiratory drive, like allude to with your comment on the CO2. I did want to add that the lack of oxygen can affect respiration, which is detected by the peripheral chemoreceptors, like in the carotid bodies.
Additionally, the thoracic stretch receptors are important for respiratory drive, where the lack of expansion of the chest will promote respiration. When a healthy young person holds their breath for short periods, say 30 seconds or so, their blood CO2 and O2 are not much different, but they still will have to fight the instinct to breathe!
I wonder if this could be used for doping in aerobic sports? Could this elevate overall oxygen intake in a healthy person?
My vague understanding is that oxygen intake is a big limiting factor in aerobic activities hence measurement of things like vo2max in sports science. ‘Blood doping’ has similar benefits though it’s also about having more blood period.
It seems unlikely that one could take a big enough suppository to help in a meaningful way in a marathon, but in a middle distance race lasting only a few minutes…
It seems unlikely, athletes are consuming liters of oxygen per minute. Plus, the impact is at least partially offset by needing to carry the extra weight with you.
Different story for apnea sports like freediving where a little bit of extra oxygen goes a long way.
Isn't liquid oxygen cryogenic (boils at -183C)? The engineering of keeping that ...there... gets interesting fast, especially when dealing with all the cold (absorbed heat from expanding gas) and containing the pressure while also releasing oxygen slowly.
The oxygen gas is dissolved into a different liquid, some kind of perfluorate in this case. You can put more oxygen molecules in a given volume when dissolved in a liquid than if you just compress the gas.
But oxygen dissolved or otherwise absorbed in a material is fair game. Even without anything fancy, water can contain about 1% free oxygen, which is 8x what you could do with gaseous oxygen (which is in turn 5x what atmospheric mixture has).
And there are a lot of chemical reactions that can produce oxygen much better than 1%. The trick is going to be avoiding heat changes.
In a trained person, the limiting factor as I understand it is the capacity of one’s blood cells to carry oxygen to the muscles. This method does not make more blood cells unlike the common doping methods used for aerobic sports like blood doping, artificial EPO.
Cyclists have been doping by taking transfusions of their own, previously donated blood. The extra blood cells can then carry more oxygen than a non-treated human.
The surface area of your lungs is like a tennis court, there is a significant difference.
This is being talked about in the ballpark of partial assistance during severe respiratory failure so more like delaying organ damage during a crisis than boosting peak athletic performance.
There was a time, where there were bellows made available along the Thames in London. Because it was believed blowing tobacco smoke up someone’s backside would be a really useful mechanism of resuscitation, in particular in case of drowning. There’s a itsy bitsy kernel of truth in everything…
I remember an old anecdote from my childhood: "A hedgehog figured out how to breathe with his butt, then sat on a tree stump and died". We live in times when even such jokes become close to reality.
> The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).
Anecdatally, I have encountered multiple people with congenital capabilities re enteral locution via anus.
Wishfully, training astronauts for enteral ventilation via anus during extravehicular activities that involve writing an ongoing Prince song would be called “EVA EVA 4EVA.”
there's a lot to air and gas within our digestive tract that we don't seem to understand.
one time when i got salmonella, i started reading up on it (believe me, i had nothing better to do) and i postulated a hypothesis: the bacteria starts out being able to (barely) survive in your normal gut biome, but creates sulfur gas in order to thrive, and then once it does, losing that atmosphere kills it.
so i started swallowing massive amounts of air, and laid down so that my head was the lowest point of my body. low tech? yes. stupid? who knows. but i was feeling better on the next day - and normally it takes a week or two to clear out.
n=1, take it with a lump of salt. hopefully sharing this helps someone in some way in the future.
The proof of concept by sea cucumbers probably predate us by several hundred million years[1]. I wonder how .any more people could be saved from COVID with this deployed.
Interesting. Perhaps related? The Ohio river(and probably others) used to have smoke enemas at points for drowning victims. I'm told it's where the phrase 'blowing smoke up your ass' comes from, as people eventually thought it was snake oil/foolish.
So this is about oxygen delivery specifically, but I can't help but wonder if whoever came up with the old idea was onto something...
Oxygenated blood should instead be directly injected into the main artery while deoxygenated blood is sucked out of the main vein and into a scrubber and rebreather apparatus for oxygenation.
That's an ECMO machine, and it works. It's also cumbersome and expensive. This kind of thing might easily become a standard resuscitation step in first responders.
I was wondering how to deal with that when this becomes a therapeutic option. Worst case might be a colostomy, so somebody whose lungs don't work at all anymore can still "breathe" and poop long term.
On the other hand, maybe it would be fine. The oxygenated fluid would just come out extra dirty sometimes. Also, if you're butt chugging oxygenated fluid all of the time, it's not like solids are going to have time to collect in the colon.
Will oxygenating the otherwise anaerobic environment cause issues with the gut microbiota?
I really expected this to be overblown clickbait, but the article delivers on the title about as well as it could. I have seen many more breathless articles on treatments that weren't already conducting human safety trials as well as having animal effectiveness trials concluded.
And yeah, it turns out that mammals can absorb oxygen through their butts. Weird
Some reptiles too. Painted turtles can survive under winter ice for months with cloacal respiration to extend their hibernation.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/the-secret-to-turtle-hi...
I know that rectal rehydration is a good method when sterile IV fluids are not available. Hopefully it's much safer than current ventilator or ECMO treatments.
> breathless
I see what you did there.
Not really. Said tissues are well vascularized and therefore lend themselves to oxygen exchange. It’s just that the lungs are especially efficient for this.
Supposedly end stage alcoholics will give themselves alcohol enemas to more readily absorb the alcohol. More direct exposure to the veins.
Which sounds like a fake urban legend, but I would never discount want an addict is capable of doing.
it pretty common. a lot of people in my high school did this, or froze beer and inserted it to get rapidly wasted. the other classic is the tampon soaked in vodka
most of this was just done because drinks were too expensive or hard to get for high schoolers and they had to optimise their alcohol supplies
> froze beer and inserted it to get rapidly wasted
Wow. TIL...
Don't treat an anecdote on the Internet like it actually happened. There have been people posting that they had friends of friends in college do this for twenty years. OP never did it but it definitely happened.
In this case it's high schoolers, half of whom most likely have no sexual experience but are fully willing to explore their anal cavity, having access to alcohol but not that much access.
They can get drunk off small amounts of alcohol, but it's such a small ration that they are freezing and destroying their limited amount of beer (which most high schoolers hate) to shove up their butts, to get drunk slightly faster? How much frozen beer can one butt fit? Is it really that much better than holding your nose and pounding it in front of your friends? Are high schoolers really going to parties with beer in their butts to maybe get a buzz of two beers from one butt beer because they only have access to one twelve pack, instead of just telling everyone how they are so wasted instead?
Not to mention the freezing point of ethanol is about -20 F. Just touching beer frozen solid enough to insert is going to instantly freeze surface water. You'd get your buttcicle maybe a quarter of the way in and it's going to start tearing layers of flesh off. I imagine it would make for hilarious fun party times.
Buttcicle hahahaha I’m dying here, lol what an awesome word
As a guy who was gotten to by some male abusers as a child, I was simultaneously laughing uncontrollably and shutting my sphincter like a bank vault door as I read this. Never experienced anything like this before.
> breathless articles
Nice.
Would it not be more direct to do gas exchange with blood?
The answer to the most important question is at the end of the article. They demonstrated that this is safe, not that it’s effective.
> “This is the first human data and the results are limited solely to demonstrating the safety of the procedure and not its effectiveness,” said co-author Takanori Takebe of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the University of Osaka in Japan. “But now that we have established tolerance, the next step will be to evaluate how effective the process is for delivering oxygen to the bloodstream.”
If it’s proven to be effective and can help avoid ventilators for (at least some) people, it would be a huge breakthrough and improvement in the quality of life for the patient and for their close ones.
My mother is currently dying in the hospital with breathing problems. I mentioned this to her earlier today... I thought this would have been much farther along than it is. Hurry up with the medical tech already!
I wonder:
- what's the actual oxygen carrying capacity? If they're up to human trials then I imagine they've already validated this step in animals
- can it also scrub CO2?
Without doing more research, I'm putting most of the probability mass into it being be a small but significant oxygenation aid. Not enough to let us survive without working lungs, but enough to push the odds in emergency situations, while also being harmless. Something like 5% extra survivability for a $100 cost and a sore butt. Well worth it, but not a revolution.
CO2 dissolves really well in Perfluorodecalin.
EDIT: I mistook solubility of oxygen by volume for that by mass - very different figure and of course effectively much lower.
I wonder if, given that our intestines can absorb gasses into our blood stream, if that also means we readily absorb our farts into our blood stream as well? The chemical composition of them could be having effects on your whole system maybe?
https://www.healthline.com/health/fart-in-mouth
Worth the risky click, that was surprisingly informative.
Thank you for your service
Agreed!
The answer is probably yes and they eventually get exhaled through the lungs or metabolized by various tissues. Gives whole new meaning to 'carrying the fart' though.
"Better out than in" might hold some weight if so.
If this was enough to temporarily replace breathing I wonder how that would feel if you were otherwise healthy. I imagine not breathing would instinctively feel quite strange and even distressing.
It would be quite distressing because of the accumulation of CO2 in the blood, even with completely adequate oxygenation delivered intrarectally. The slight change in acid-base balance is what makes a person feel the need to breathe, and CO2 is an acidic byproduct of metabolism. This is why people with metabolic acidosis (e.g. in diabetic ketoacidosis or sepsis) have an increased respiratory rate.
Would CO2 still build up if someone isn't breathing at all? I'm guessing so, since you say CO2 is a byproduct of metabolism. Alternatively, could respiration exhaust enough CO2 even in a situation where the lungs are too damaged to take in sufficient oxygen?
All that apart, I'm guessing this would be used in emergency situations, where a patient is likely already unconscious and could be kept under sedation until transferred to ECMO. Is CO2 buildup dangerous on its own? If so, in what kind of time-frame? What's the upper limit on the additional minutes this therapy could buy?
In my thoracic surgery rotations in med school I was taught that the strongest stimulus for increasing the respiratory drive was the acidification of cerebrospinal fluid. Which, of course, correlates with the blood pH. This information comes from some studies in the 60s with goats, and the old guard are happy to hang their hat on it.
There are also chemoreceptors for oxygen concentration in the circulatory system as well.
I think everything you have said is correct, I just wanted to add a few more details for anyone who is interested.
From the littlei know from a breath holding workshop I did awhile ago (for trying to get into freediving) it's the carbon dioxide build up in our blood that gives us the urge to breath, and not the lack of oxygen. If this method allowed for the removal of carbon dioxide from the blood then holding your breath might not even be discomforting.
Edit: goodells explained it better!
I'm scuba certified.
Now I'm wondering if I should get certified to dive with an anal rebreather too.
The acid base balance of the cerebrospinal fluid is the primary driver of the respiratory drive, like allude to with your comment on the CO2. I did want to add that the lack of oxygen can affect respiration, which is detected by the peripheral chemoreceptors, like in the carotid bodies.
Additionally, the thoracic stretch receptors are important for respiratory drive, where the lack of expansion of the chest will promote respiration. When a healthy young person holds their breath for short periods, say 30 seconds or so, their blood CO2 and O2 are not much different, but they still will have to fight the instinct to breathe!
I wonder if this could be used for doping in aerobic sports? Could this elevate overall oxygen intake in a healthy person?
My vague understanding is that oxygen intake is a big limiting factor in aerobic activities hence measurement of things like vo2max in sports science. ‘Blood doping’ has similar benefits though it’s also about having more blood period.
It seems unlikely that one could take a big enough suppository to help in a meaningful way in a marathon, but in a middle distance race lasting only a few minutes…
It seems unlikely, athletes are consuming liters of oxygen per minute. Plus, the impact is at least partially offset by needing to carry the extra weight with you.
Different story for apnea sports like freediving where a little bit of extra oxygen goes a long way.
A liter of liquid is a lot more than a liter of gas ...
Isn't liquid oxygen cryogenic (boils at -183C)? The engineering of keeping that ...there... gets interesting fast, especially when dealing with all the cold (absorbed heat from expanding gas) and containing the pressure while also releasing oxygen slowly.
The oxygen gas is dissolved into a different liquid, some kind of perfluorate in this case. You can put more oxygen molecules in a given volume when dissolved in a liquid than if you just compress the gas.
Watch the abyss. The mouse!
Um yeah don't use liquid oxygen.
But oxygen dissolved or otherwise absorbed in a material is fair game. Even without anything fancy, water can contain about 1% free oxygen, which is 8x what you could do with gaseous oxygen (which is in turn 5x what atmospheric mixture has).
And there are a lot of chemical reactions that can produce oxygen much better than 1%. The trick is going to be avoiding heat changes.
There's a lot of water so as long as my anal cooling fins project into the cooling fluid it sounds like I'll be down there for hours.
> Um yeah don't use liquid oxygen.
You could probably do it once..
In a trained person, the limiting factor as I understand it is the capacity of one’s blood cells to carry oxygen to the muscles. This method does not make more blood cells unlike the common doping methods used for aerobic sports like blood doping, artificial EPO.
Cyclists have been doping by taking transfusions of their own, previously donated blood. The extra blood cells can then carry more oxygen than a non-treated human.
The surface area of your lungs is like a tennis court, there is a significant difference.
This is being talked about in the ballpark of partial assistance during severe respiratory failure so more like delaying organ damage during a crisis than boosting peak athletic performance.
There was a time, where there were bellows made available along the Thames in London. Because it was believed blowing tobacco smoke up someone’s backside would be a really useful mechanism of resuscitation, in particular in case of drowning. There’s a itsy bitsy kernel of truth in everything…
I remember an old anecdote from my childhood: "A hedgehog figured out how to breathe with his butt, then sat on a tree stump and died". We live in times when even such jokes become close to reality.
> The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).
Anecdatally, I have encountered multiple people with congenital capabilities re enteral locution via anus.
Wishfully, training astronauts for enteral ventilation via anus during extravehicular activities that involve writing an ongoing Prince song would be called “EVA EVA 4EVA.”
there's a lot to air and gas within our digestive tract that we don't seem to understand.
one time when i got salmonella, i started reading up on it (believe me, i had nothing better to do) and i postulated a hypothesis: the bacteria starts out being able to (barely) survive in your normal gut biome, but creates sulfur gas in order to thrive, and then once it does, losing that atmosphere kills it.
so i started swallowing massive amounts of air, and laid down so that my head was the lowest point of my body. low tech? yes. stupid? who knows. but i was feeling better on the next day - and normally it takes a week or two to clear out.
n=1, take it with a lump of salt. hopefully sharing this helps someone in some way in the future.
https://www.cell.com/med/abstract/S2666-6340(25)00314-9
DOI: 10.1016/j.medj.2025.100887
The proof of concept by sea cucumbers probably predate us by several hundred million years[1]. I wonder how .any more people could be saved from COVID with this deployed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_cucumber
It somehow resonates in me with one of the first memes I was sharing
For those unfamiliar with this piece of internet history: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twpdnV2Yq1E>
Interesting. Perhaps related? The Ohio river(and probably others) used to have smoke enemas at points for drowning victims. I'm told it's where the phrase 'blowing smoke up your ass' comes from, as people eventually thought it was snake oil/foolish.
So this is about oxygen delivery specifically, but I can't help but wonder if whoever came up with the old idea was onto something...
In the 18th century the Royal Humane Society also put rectal bellows along the banks of the Thames in London for the benefit of the drowned.
Could this completely obviate tracheotomies and ventilators?
No, the total surface of intestine is up to 40m^2, while the single lung has 100 m^2 for exchange. It might be a supplementary method at best.
Oxygenated blood should instead be directly injected into the main artery while deoxygenated blood is sucked out of the main vein and into a scrubber and rebreather apparatus for oxygenation.
Much better in every way.
That's an ECMO machine, and it works. It's also cumbersome and expensive. This kind of thing might easily become a standard resuscitation step in first responders.
It’s unclear how they cycle the oxygenated fluid and … cycle the fecal matter that is likely to occur
I was wondering how to deal with that when this becomes a therapeutic option. Worst case might be a colostomy, so somebody whose lungs don't work at all anymore can still "breathe" and poop long term.
On the other hand, maybe it would be fine. The oxygenated fluid would just come out extra dirty sometimes. Also, if you're butt chugging oxygenated fluid all of the time, it's not like solids are going to have time to collect in the colon.
Will oxygenating the otherwise anaerobic environment cause issues with the gut microbiota?
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662831