Tapeworms... as a weight loss product?

So I'm wandering around Yahoo! Answers one day and there's a girl who is desperate to lose a ton of weight within two weeks, in time for her prom. She has apparently heard that tapeworms make you lose a ton of weight quickly and wants to know how quickly they work. I sincerely hope that no one reading this has actually considered this - but then, if you found my site on a search engine it's probably because you are considering it.

You would be better off deciding to be anorexic for two weeks.

Tape worms, kill you. They could end up in all sorts of vital organs, where they will use up everything your body needs to survive. If they end up in your stomach, which I assume is the goal, you will starve to death. It's like anorexia without the effort of avoiding food - because the thing will eat everything you put into your body.

Often people with tape worms show no symptoms... well, until they end up in the hospital.

Signs and symptoms of tape worms in your intestines:
-Nausea
-Diarrhea
-Significant weight loss/malnutrition (which makes you look like you're from a third world country)
-Abdominal pain
-Weakness

When it gets into other organs, it will cause tissue and organ damage:
-Fever
-Cystic masses/lumps
-Allergic reaction to the larvae
-Bacterial infections
-Siezures and other bodily malfunctions if it gets into your brain

It can kill you within a month, depending on which part of your body it gets to... and as you can see, it wouldn't be pleasant. The girl who originally got me on this topic wouldn't even make it to her prom if she tried this method.

And if that wasn't enough to deter you...

The treatment could be medication or surgery. The medication can cause dizzieness, hair loss, fever, nausea, vomiting. The surgery can be extremely invasive and take a long time to recover from depending on how far the infection has gotten, and it won't return your bodily functions to how they were before.

I know it's bad form to start off a blog with an old response - but this issue still shocks me, and I wanted to make sure I remembered to post it.

Introduction

I am a 20 year old soon-to-be-mom (though some would say my fiancee is my first child) who simply enjoys answering people's questions. After spending hours upon hours every day on sites such as Yahoo! Answers, I got sick of repeating myself and decided to start a blog instead. I'll still be on those sites, but instead of writing out the same long responses over and over again I'll just post a link to one of my blog posts.

I found that most of the questions I enjoy answering are related (though sometimes vaguely) to medical/health issues, so those are the types of questions I am going to be answering here. If you don't see the answer to your question posted already, feel free to e-mail me (oceanlady@gmail.com) your question and I will try to get it answered. On days that I do not have e-mailed questions from readers, I will simply be grabbing questions from forums (repeated anonymously here) and answering them.

I do not have any medical background. However, my family has a rather interesting medical history and I have always been the type of over-curious person who just has to research everything for the sake of learning. The facts I post here will come from actual research, I am simply aiming to put it all in one easily-accessible place. I have found, while trying to ease my own curiosity as well as answering other people's questions, that often you need to go to five or six different sources to find all the information you want. Hopefully I will succeed in putting the information from those different sources in one place for you to access.

If you are ever reading a post and feel it is lacking in information, feel free to post a response or send me an e-mail asking a related question and I will be happy to update it.

Lastly, I am going to do my best to update daily... if I haven't been doing that, feel free to spam my inbox until I get back to posting.