Doctor Revives Him by Whispering Something Lewd in His Ear
A teen-age who boy fell into a coma and was hospitalized after watching Paris Hilton’s lascivious hamburger commercial 200 times non-stop regained consciousness today.
Moments after awakening, Dennis Stringfellow, 17, whispered to his mother, “I need a hamburger real bad.”
Overjoyed at her son’s recovery, Alice Stringfellow rushed to the cafeteria at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center to obtain one of the cafeteria’s enormous — and notorious — Heart Buster burgers.
Stringfellow apparently fell into the coma after watching the 60-second Paris Hilton hamburger commercial non-stop on the Internet for more than three hours in his bedroom at the family home in the tony Philadelphia suburb of Paoli. His mother found him slumped over his computer keyboard and summoned paramedics.
The teenager was revived by Dr. David Schneiderman, a Philadelphia neurologist who specializes in treating mass media saturation syndrome, an illness Schneiderman discovered and described in his best-selling book Wake Them Up Before It’s Too Late.
As part of his efforts to revive Stringfellow, Schneiderman sent a forensic team into the teen’s bedroom. They found an image of Hilton’s burger commercial on the computer screen.
Examination of the computer’s hard drive revealed that Stringfellow had watched the 60-second commercial 212 times over a period of three hours and forty minutes. That meant the teen paused an average of 2.26 seconds before watching the commercial again.
“There’s no question that such frenetic viewing of a video clip that is very nearly pornographic, if not, in fact, pornographic, is what pushed this young man over the edge,” Schneiderman said after reviving Stringfellow.
Part of Schneiderman’s trademark treatment of mass media saturation syndrome cases is that after studying the patient and the stimuli that induced the coma, the neurologist then repeatedly whispers a phrase in the comatose patient’s ear. That stimulus leads to the patient’s emergence from the coma.
In prior cases of MMSS, Schneiderman has shared the phrase with the media, sometimes with great fanfare. He declined to do so in the Stringfellow case.
“Let’s just say it was a somewhat scatalogical phrase that would be therapeutic for a 17-year-old male, but which might be misunderstood by the public,” Schneiderman said.
Asked if the phrase might contain the C-word or the F-word, Schneiderman said, “I’m not going to play guessing games. Whatever the phrase was, it worked.”
The Paris Hilton video, which has now been downloaded from the Internet an estimated 10 billion times, shows the woman wearing a provocative bathing suit and washing a car. At the end of the 60-second film, she eats a giant hamburger sold by the Carl’s Jr. fast-food chain. Guardians of public morality have roundly denounced Hilton and her car washing antics, the bathing suit, the soap suds, and the hamburger.