Talk:Fire breather's pneumonia

Fire breathing vs Fire Eating

There exists some confusion in the medical literature about the difference between fire breathing and fire eating. Fire breathing involves taking a liquid fuel into one's mouth, typically a high flash-point (low volatility) oil such as lamp oil, and spewing that fuel into a fine mist over a torch, creating a fireball. Fire eating involves taking a small torch soaked in a low flash-point (volatile) fuel, such as white gas, putting it in one's mouth, and extinguishing it and/or using those gas vapors to perform other tricks. Fire eating is extremely difficult to perform with nonvolatile oils - you can't do vapor tricks at all, and extinguishing is difficult - and fire breathing is exceptionally dangerous with volatile fuels - it causes flashback.

Shaihk et al's article is titled "Exogenous lipid pneumonia (Fire-eater's lung)" yet refers to the patient aspirating tiki torch oil - a high flash point fuel commonly used in fire breathing. This probably traces back to Brander 1992, which in turn probably takes the nomenclature from Agrawal PK, Srivastava DK 1986. Many other articles refer to "fire-eaters". All of the articles I have read that mention the type of fuel used specify high flash point oils, meaning that the patients were most likely attempting fire breathing, not fire eating. Chemical pneumonia among fire performers is much more commonly caused by fire breathing, not fire eating (no citation, life experience). I think this is a case of long-standing confusion in the medical literature. I don't really expect doctors dealing with a very rare case to get the terminology correct, especially when there is a precedent of using the term "fire-eater" in the literature. MachinaLabs (talk) 20:51, 20 August 2014 (UTC)