Bet she voted for the Marxist....

Because life can always be more horrifying, an emergency room nurse appeared on the show Untold Stories of The E.R. with a story involving the mother of a teenage pageant contestant who fed her daughter tapeworms in order to help her lose weight. When reached for comment, God said, "Florida, right? Damn. I was so high that day...."

Nurse Maricar Cabral-Osori told the show that a young girl was admitted one night with a bulging stomach and severe stomach cramps. Initially, Cabral-Osori suspected the girl was pregnant and she was sent for a CT scan. The scan came back negative for pregnancy but did show that there was something in the girl's intestines.

I know. Hang in there. It gets so much worse.

The cause of the girl's stomach pain became clear later on when the girl went to the restroom and was found screaming over a toilet filled with tapeworms. Cabral-Osori said the mother admitted buying pills containing tapeworm eggs in Mexico and feeding them to her daughter. She quoted the mother as saying, "I'm so sorry. You know I just did it to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on to the pageant."

The use of tapeworms to lose weight is  more myth than common practice. As as How Stuff Works discovered:

There is evidence of advertising, from the late 19th and early 20th century, hawking "sanitized tapeworms" to help women maintain a slim figure. Whether the pills sold actually contained tapeworms or whether women actually ingested them hoping to acquire a tapeworm is difficult to verify...It seems unlikely, but there's also a good chance that somewhere in the long, strange history of humanity, someone somewhere did try using a tapeworm to lose weight. So, the answer to the question, "Did it happen?" is most likely yes, but it was probably never widespread.

However, the idiots among us can buy pills claiming to contain tapeworms online from vitamin and supplement shops because what? Yes, in between ads for pills designed to rid your dog of tapeworms, there are pills with enticing names like Parastroy and Parasitin that you can take with your One-A-Day multivitamin if you don't value your life and are cool with growing a thirty-foot-long worm in your intestine that could kill you.