“My daughter had this weird-looking object in her stool” says this reader about the long, thin piece of matter pictured below. Our reader states that the “odd shaped worm” has not moved, but is worrying them “to death”.

After already looking online for worms that match the one our reader found in their daughter’s stool, they come to us for help.

While we will help in the ways that we can, we have to make it abundantly clear that we will not be able to identify the object for our reader. As the object has passed from a person’s body, this becomes a health concern, which in turn makes it a medical issue.

Since we are not medical professionals, we are not qualified, or legally able, to identify potential organisms that come from people’s bodies, because doing so would be the same as providing a diagnosis.

For the same reason, we are not qualified to provide any medical advice whatsoever. Thus, the only thing we can do is point our reader in the right direction for where to go for professional help.

Our reader’s first instinct might be to take their daughter to her doctor or to the ER, and while this is usually one’s best bet for any medical issue, it might not be in this case. This is because primary care doctors and ER doctors do not generally receive training in parasitology (that is not to say that what our reader found is a parasite, but that is the field that deals with worms that come from people’s bodies).

Unfortunately, many of our past readers have experienced humiliation when going to their doctors, who have dismissed them as delusional. We do not wish for our reader to share that experience, so we instead recommend consulting a medical parasitologist: they specialize in diagnosing and treating infections caused by organisms.

What we can recommend is that our reader do one or more of the following:

1) Search for a medical parasitologist in their area using this directory of medical parasitology consultants: https://www.astmh.org/for-astmh-members/clinical-consultants-directory.
2) Search for a local parasitologist by doing a Google search for “medical parasitologist (name of the closest big city)” or “tropical medicine specialist (name of the closest big city)”.
3) Get in touch with Dr. Omar Amin at the Parasitology Center at https://www.parasitetesting.com.

To conclude, we hope that the resources above help our reader in getting answers for their daughter as to what this object may be. We apologize for our inability to give direct help, but hope that this article proves useful to some degree and that our reader’s daughter gets the medical advice and potential help that she may require as soon as possible.

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