11:03pm February 27, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: Some advice plz...

voltron-da-eclair:

So one of my clients has a stim where he bites his fingers so hard that they become so calloused and sometimes even bleeding to the point that he can’t use them for functional tasks like holding a fork or pen. Long before I started working with him, the redirection for…

My roommate in the hospital last fall on the neuro ward was diagnosed with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome after a lifetime of severe finger-biting to the point it permanently visibly destroyed parts of her fingers. Sometimes it’s not a stim as much as a weird genetic-metabolic quirk. She had been treated awful her whole life – she was an old woman – with no diagnosis, and was amazed to get an explanation. So if someone is really destroying their hands or fingers to a huge degree by biting, especially also having a developmental disability of some kind, it could be important to get checked out. As I recall there was a really simple medication that helped her stop pretty much instantly.

Mind you this was very severe. She was missing parts of her fingers. I have bitten my hands a lot but not anywhere near to the same degree, hers were constantly scarred, missing skin, needing careful dressing several times a day to avoid infection, and missing her entire fingertips. But it’s still worth looking into. It was so compulsive that she couldn’t stop and could give no reason at all for doing it. But it had something to do with the way her body metabolized things and once she got treatment she stopped.

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