A clever doctor from an Indian hospital successfully removed a magnet stuck in a eight year old girl's lungs! Read on to know how...

When doctors in an Indian hospital were presented with a nine year-old girl with a magnet stuck in her lung they struggled to remove it with surgery. After considering how best to dislodge the small piece of metal, they settled on a clever idea – they would use another magnet.

The girl had swallowed the one-inch magnet by accident while playing with her sister and was having trouble breathing. A surgeon at a hospital in Mangalore – about 600 miles south of Mumbai – could not grip the smooth magnet with tools when he tried to pull it out. Instead, in an unusual procedure the surgeon moved another, stronger magnet across the outside of the girl’s body to shift it out of the lung. The attracting force of the magnets allowed him to slide the blockage along her windpipe and into her mouth, from where he was easily able to remove it. A paediatric surgeon at the KMC Hospital in Mangalore said using another magnet made it ‘easy’ to remove the choking hazard.