Credit: Instagram, Charles Sykes/Bravo
Dr. Tiffany Moon took to her Instagram page on Sunday to weigh in on a recent encounter between Annemarie Wiley and Sutton Stracke on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
After Annemarie, 40, a nurse anesthetist, was seen telling Sutton, 52, that her esophagus condition was a symptom rather than a diagnosis, and telling her she simply needs to “chew [her] food more,” the Real Housewives of Dallas alum, 39, slammed Annemarie’s antics and said her assessment is downright “wrong.”
“I think it was very disturbing how Annemarie was, like, weaponizing her medical profession to tell Sutton things about her own condition,” Tiffany, a board-certified anesthesiologist, began in her December 17 video.
“I’m gonna digress here a bit and just talk about the esophagus,” she continued. “The esophagus exists for one reason, which is to get food from your mouth into your stomach. It’s just like a long, narrow tube. Sometimes the esophagus can have a stricture, which is a narrowing, and it can be severe or it can be mild.”
According to Tiffany, the first symptom patients usually experience is difficulty swallowing.
“So you don’t just chew your food more. A stricture is a stricture, and you can chew your food all you want, but unless you blend it into a smoothie, if your stricture is narrow, you’re gonna have the feeling of food stuck in your esophagus,” she shared. “The most common cause is GORD, which is reflux disease, very common, peptic ulcer disease, cancer, eosinophilic esophagitis.”
Tiffany went on to say that she specializes in thoracic anesthesia and is familiar with the procedures used to dilate the narrowing.
“Basically,” she detailed, “we put a scope down the patient’s mouth and go into the esophagus and locate where the stricture is. And then using a bougie, a balloon, or a guided wire, we are able to tent open the stricture a little bit more. I have done hundreds of these surgeries and it’s a minor procedure. [But] you do have to undergo anesthesia for it most of the time.”
Also in her clip, Tiffany said that the moment between Annemarie and Sutton was “kind of cringy.”
“I don’t know what made her go at Sutton so hard, especially since it was her party. I found that to be incredibly rude. But yeah, let’s not use our medical knowledge to come at people, especially when you’re wrong,” she concluded.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 13 airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Bravo.