Can You Die From Biting Your Nails?

Well, that escalated quickly. From biting your nails to no longer living? Is this even possible? While nail biting has a number of well-known side effects and some that aren’t as well known, most nail biters assume that they can deal with the results of biting their nails when it comes down to ugly-looking nails, occasional bleeding and a bit of pain when we bite or pick too much of our nails and require a few days for the nail to grow back and heal.

While the odds are low of biting your nails and dying as a result, nail biting does introduce bacteria into your mouth and possibly to your stomach that can lead to a number of side effects including infections, diarrhea, stomach cramping and more. There have been rare cases where nail biters have ended up with very serious diseases including sepsis, an illness that kills 250,000 American each year and infects up to 1,500,000 people each year.

Nail Biting And Serious Illnesses

Further to what we just spoke about, sepsis is one disease that can be introduced into the body through the fingers and hands and nail biting is a perfect vehicle to do so. A 40-year old British man contracted a fatal blood infection triggered by his nail biting that resulted in a heart attack and he died in hospital 2 weeks later.

In another case, a 28 year old otherwise healthy man in the UK contracted sepsis and had to be hospitalized after biting his fingers and skin on the side of his nails. He was a long time nail biter due to nervousness and according to doctors came close to dying as a result of the sepsis diagnosis.

Another case in the UK involved a person who bit one finger nail down so much that they contracted a disease that also required hospitalization. While the person survived, they were advised by doctors in hospital that the disease was traveling up their arm and could have become fatal if they had not sought medical treatment. Check out the pictures of the person’s finger as a warning.

Serious Side Effects

If you checked out the last link above of the infected finger of the chronic nail biter, you might have been grossed out and rightly so. While nail biting can lead to life threatening diseases when it introduces serious illnesses into our body, it can also have other affects on our body that might not be life threatening but life changing.

If you’ve bitten your nails long enough, you have probably experienced paronychia. In certain cases, the finger infection known as paronychia that affects the cuticle has been so severe in some people that the tip of their finger has been amputated to stop the spread of the disease.

Symptoms of paronychia include a pain and swelling typically on the side of the nail bed along with other possible symptoms include a pus-filled sore and swelling that starts to extend and increase. Your best bet is to visit a doctor as soon as possible to get it checked out to be safe.

What We Know About Nail Biting

We know that nail biting can cause a number of negative side effects.

• Ugly-looking nails, bleeding and finger pain when you bite off too much.
• Tooth cracking and breaking.
• Stress on the roots of your teeth which can lead to further dental problems.
• Decreased results from orthodontic braces if you wear them.
• Infections in your mouth, nails and fingers.
• Stomach issues like diarrhea and cramping if you get bacteria in your stomach from nail biting.
• Damage to your nail bed over time which may not fully heal.

It has been widely reported that chronic nail biting adds about $4,000 to lifetime dental bills if you’re looking for a monetary cost of the habit. If you think about the list above, consider what has been a problem for you specifically in your life as you’ve been biting your nails as the amount could be much higher if you frequently get sick and have to take time off work.

Sometimes in life, it’s difficult to get to the bottom of a particular problem or illness and then find out that it’s due to something you never considered. I had back pain for years and assumed it was from an old back injury that I remember giving myself earlier in life. Through trial and error, reading and research, I realized that in actuality my back pain flared up because of tight hamstring muscles in my legs. The more I stretch my hamstrings and keep them loose, the less back pain I have since they are related muscles.

Nail biting seems like a bad habit that is embarrassing at worst but in fact can be a lot more severe when we consider what we’re really doing every time we put our fingers in our mouth.

Conclusion

If you’re a chronic nail biter like me, your first question should be to ask yourself what can I do to actually stop biting my nails once and for all? In this heightened era of health awareness given the COVID-19 pandemic, every time we put our fingers in our mouth to bite or pick them, we run the risk of introducing very serious illnesses into our mouth and possibly to our stomach which increases the risk of serious illness.

Check out the article How To Quit Biting Your Nails to learn more about strategies that might help you quit nail biting once and for all.