Note: I am not la looking for medical advice. Do not remove my post.
I had a terrible stomachache last night and ended up in hospital. I threw up once at home and I only puked the food I had eaten 20 min before. Later at the hospital I threw up what I had eaten for lunch. Why the first time I didn’t threw up a mix of both. How does the stomach selects what to throw up?
My wife always says that the body is wise and only expels what hurts you. Kinda right to think that way but how does it work.
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Think of the various situations in which vomiting occurs: you’re sick, you ate something bad (food poisoning), you have vertigo, something very stressful occurred, you had chemotherapy, you just had surgery. My wife threw up her salmon dinner when she went into labor. There was nothing wrong with the salmon. After my grandmother’s funeral, I threw up in the bushes. There was nothing noxious that needed to be expelled.
What these scenarios have in common is that chemicals in the body were released that were picked up by one of four “vomiting centers,” which are nerves that detect these chemicals. They create the sensation of nausea (sometimes with stress there is no nausea – you just vomit) and set in motion the muscular contractions that cause you to vomit. For example, nerves in the tube-like structure of your intestines may detect toxins in food you just ate. Nerve impulses go straight to your brainstem, via the vagus nerve. Or the intestines may respond to something noxious and release chemicals that circulate in your blood and reach a vomiting center in your brainstem. I remember a story of a baseball player who accidentally swallowed some chewing tobacco juice and starting puking during a game, and another player in the outfield saw this and started puking in response. Player #1 vomited because of his body’s detection of something noxious, and player #2 vomited because his brain “saw” something disgusting. So there are multiple areas in our body that can set off vomiting. They all send neural signals to a part of our brainstem that coordinates all the actions involved in vomiting.
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