Earlier this week, the Guardian published a video of rapper Yasiin Bey demonstrating a force-feeding procedure that Guantanamo Bay Prison inmates on hunger strike undergo. The video shows Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, gasping and writhing in pain as someone in scrubs attempts to insert a feeding tube up his nose. With more than 4 million YouTube views as of this writing, the video has become the latest symbol of the United States’s problematic treatment—some say torture—of Guantanamo prisoners. Setting aside, for a moment, the moral implications, let us consider the visceral ones: What can the procedure do to your health?

 

For starters, it can kill you, says Dr. Steven Miles a practicing physician and founder of the Doctors Who Torture accountability project.