Science / Medicine : Harmonica Playing Hits Sour Note

Today’s health tip: Don’t play the harmonica for six hours at a stretch.

Doctors at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, say they puzzled over a patient who periodically spit up blood, but only on Saturday and Sunday nights. Then they discovered that the problem started after the man began attending a club each weekend where he played the harmonica for up to six hours at a time.

The man, they found, favored a technique in which the tongue is raked back and forth along the harmonica to insure that the proper note is blown. After hours of doing that, blood vessels in his tongue were being ruptured, producing the bleeding, they said.

The condition is called “harmonica player’s hemoptylsis” in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.