Elvis And His Colon

According to a Fox News exclusive published today, Elvis may not have died in 1977 from cardiac arrhythmia, as has been widely reported, but rather, according to Elvis’s attending physician, Dr. George “Nick” Nichopoulos, he possibly died from the effects of chronic constipation. According to the Fox News article,

“After he died we weren’t sure (of the exact cause of death) so I continued to do some research and I had some doctors call me from different places and different med schools that were doing research on constipation and different problems you can get into with it. I just want to get the story straight — it all made sense with the new research that was done,” the now retired Memphis M.D told Pop Tarts. “Dr. Nick” was by Presley’s side for the last twelve years of his life and tried to resuscitate him the day he died. He recently released the book “The King and Dr. Nick” about his time with The King, and his theory on the death that shocked America. “We didn’t realize until the autopsy that his constipation was as bad – we knew it was bad because it was hard for us to treat, but we didn’t realize what it had done," the doctor explains of Elvis’ condition. "We just assumed that the constipation was secondary to the meds that he was taking for his arthritic pain and for his insomnia.”

Astonishingly, according to Dr. Nichopoulous, the autopsy revealed that Elvis’s colon was 5 to 6 inches in diameter (in contrast to the normal width of 2-3 inches) and instead of being the standard 4 to 5 feet long, his colon was 8-9 feet long.

“The constipation upset him quite a bit because Elvis thought that he could handle almost anything, he thought he was really a man’s man and he wasn’t going to let something like this . . . he thought that this was a sign of weakness and he wasn’t going to be weak,” Nichopoulos said. “And it’s not the kind of thing you table talk. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s you didn’t talk about constipation much, you didn’t hear people complaining about it, or saying what they did or how much trouble they had with it.”

Actually, the issue of Elvis’s dietary and bathroom habits was explored about twenty years by the enormously unpopular (at least to Elvis fans) Albert Goldman, in his book, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours (1990). Goldman discussed in detail how drug intake would have led to chronic constipation. The full Fox News article is available here.