Coca cola cleanse for bezoars

I know this was meant to be funny, but the question that I can't seem to resolve is what on Earth made the doctors think that Coca-Cola was the solution to this? I'm glad it worked but still it's an odd thought...

If you are going to cleanse, you really need to choose your product, someone posted about pizza cleanses yesterday. That was meant to be funny. Coca cola is serious business; It's a real treatment option and has a history:

Persimmon bezoar successfully treated by oral intake of Coca-Cola: a case report
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2627813/

or

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22393302
Treatment of gastric phytobezoars with Coca-Cola given via oral route: a case report.
Ertuğrul G, Coşkun M, Sevinç M, Ertuğrul F, Toydemir T.
Author information Department of General Surgery, Düzce Atatürk State Hospital, Muncurlu, Düzce, Turkey.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A 43-year-old female patient presented with a chief complaint of upper abdominal pain. As her complaints had lasted for 1 month, an upper gastrointestinal system endoscopy was performed and discovered a bezoar in the stomach.

CASE PRESENTATION: The bezoar was quite hard and light green-yellow in color. Pathological examination revealed phytobezoar. The patient was hospitalized and given oral Coca-Cola(®) Zero for seven days at a dose of 500 mL three times daily.

CONCLUSION: The upper gastrointestinal system endoscopy performed at the end of 7 days showed that the phytobezoar had softened and become smaller. The phytobezoar was broken into pieces with biopsy forceps and washing was applied, so the phytobezoar pieces could pass through the pylorus. The patient was discharged after the procedure without problem.

or

Systematic review: Coca-Cola can effectively dissolve gastric phytobezoars as a first-line treatment.
Ladas SD, Kamberoglou D, Karamanolis G, Vlachogiannakos J, Zouboulis-Vafiadis I.
Author information Gastroenterology Division, First Department of Medicine - Propaedeutic, Medical School, Athens University, Laikon Hospital, Athens, Greece.
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Gastric phytobezoars represent the most common bezoars in patients with poor gastric motility. A variety of dissolution therapies and endoscopic fragmentation techniques have been evaluated as conservative treatment so as to avoid surgery.

AIM: To investigate the effectiveness of Coca-Cola for gastric phytobezoars dissolution.

METHODS: We performed a systematic search to identify publications on gastric phytobezoars to assess the efficacy of Coca-Cola as a dissolution therapy. Diospyrobezoars, formed after persimmon ingestion, are a distinct type of phytobezoars characterized by their hard consistency. Thus, these two subgroups of bezoars were compared in terms of successful dissolution.

RESULTS: Over a 10-year period (2002-2012), 24 papers including 46 patients have been published. In 91.3% of the cases, phytobezoar resolution with Coca-Cola administration was successful, either as a single treatment (50%) or combined with further endoscopic techniques, whereas only 4 patients underwent surgery. Phytobezoars were more likely to dissolve after initial attempt with Coca-Cola compared with diospyrobezoars (60.6% vs. 23%, P = 0.022).

CONCLUSIONS: Coca-Cola alone is effective in gastric phytobezoar dissolution in half of the cases and, combined with additional endoscopic methods, is successful in more than 90% of them.

Thank you for more information, however my curiosity was piqued as to how the idea of using Coca-Cola as a means of disolving bezoars originated. Even the original paper claims that they do not fully understand the mechanism through which it works.

My statement was not really a question I was posing to you but more of a sense of wonder that this solution was found in the first place as soda is not high up on the list of things people think of as treatments to medical problems.