A ghost pepper challenge nearly killed a man by tearing a hole in his oesophagus

Our competitive nature may be the thing that pushes us to achieve things never before accomplished and to test the limits of human potential, but that nature can also easily backfire — sometimes with dangerous or deadly consequences.

Recently, a 47-year-old man who showed up at a San Francisco emergency room perfectly demonstrated that fact.

A ghost pepper challenge — people do this sort of thing on YouTube frequently — left him with a hole in his oesophagus. That injury could have killed him, but luckily he received treatment first.

Ghost peppers, or Bhut Jolokia, reliably come in near the top of rankings of the hottest, most-painful to consume chillies in the world. (They’ve been surpassed on the Scoville scale, a measure of the “heat” brought by these carefully cultivated instruments of pain, by several others, including the Naga Viper, Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, and Carolina Reaper.) 

Before arriving at the hospital, the patient had been “at a local restaurant featuring a hamburger topped with ghost pepper puree as part of an eating contest,” according to a case report published in the journal Clinical Communications by University of California–San Francisco emergency department personnel.

Upon arriving at the ER, doctors noted that he was experiencing severe abdominal and chest pain after the challenge had left him violently “retching and vomiting.” For whatever it’s worth, the patient had successfully finished the burger.

Six glasses of water had done nothing for his pain, unsurprisingly. A medically administered “gastrointestinal cocktail” also failed to alleviate his symptoms, including a heart rate of 106 beats per minute. The doctors write that he continued to grow more and more hypoxic, meaning that not enough oxygen was reaching his organs.