In order to better understand what his patients go through, Dr. Feng Zhuo, a deputy director of the Proctology Department at a Shanghai hospital, recently performed a 15-minute colonoscopy on himself.
Ask anyone who’s ever had a colonoscopy and they’ll tell you that it’s one of the most painful and uncomfortable things they’ve ever experienced. Despite sedation being used to relieve discomfort, having a flexible instrument about the diameter of an index finger inserted through your backside and poking around through your colon is not the most pleasant thing in the world, but it is the most effective way of detecting bowel diseases like colon cancer. No one in their right mind would ever undergo the invasive procedure unless their life literally depended on it, and yet one Chinese proctologist performed it on himself, even though he didn’t need to.
