Boom! “Science that’s hard to take seriously and even harder to ignore”

Scott Lafee‘s Wellnews syndicated column often presents tidbits about things that have won Ig Nobel Prizes. Here’s the most recent (August 19, 2019):

Ig Nobel Apprised

The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate achievements that make people laugh and then think — a look at real science that’s hard to take seriously and even harder to ignore.

In 2012, the Ig Nobel Prize in medicine went to a pair of French researchers for their advice to doctors performing colonoscopies on how to minimize their patients’ chance of exploding.

More about those explosions…

The 2012 Ig Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti [FRANCE] for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimize the chance that their patients will explode.

Here are two of their several medical publications about this:

“Colonic Gas Explosion During Therapeutic Colonoscopy with Electrocautery,” Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, Emmanuel Ben-Soussan, World Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 13, no. 40, October 2007, pp. 5295–8.
“Argon Plasma Coagulation in the Treatment of Hemorrhagic Radiation Proctitis is Efficient But Requires a Perfect Colonic Cleansing to Be Safe,” E. Ben-Soussan, M. Antonietti, G. Savoye, S. Herve, P. Ducrotté, and E. Lerebours, European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, vol. 16, no. 12, December 2004, pp 1315-8.