“Muslim says, 'Take some activated charcoal, it's going to help you.' I said no,” Islam Makhachev told listeners as he revisited the chaotic night after his 2019 UFC debut, when a routine effort to settle his stomach turned into an emergency. He said he followed his teammate’s insistence, swallowed the pills — and the rest of the evening unraveled.
Makhachev said the pills were not charcoal but seven laxatives, taken while his stomach was empty after he had been vomiting following a unanimous decision win over Arman Tsarukyan. “And I still remember him saying, 'Hey, just one time listen to me and take activated charcoal.'”
The error was immediate and serious: “So he gives me the pills. I'm taking them all, and it's like it came down from a waterfall as my stomach is empty,” Makhachev recalled. His team tried to find a manganese solution to counteract the pills but couldn’t get it without a prescription, and they called emergency services instead. Paramedics confirmed he had swallowed seven laxatives on an empty stomach and an ambulance was dispatched.
The numbers underline how quickly a minor post-fight ailment became a medical incident: seven pills, one emergency response, and about one and a half months of recovery. Makhachev said the episode left him incapacitated enough that he spent the next month and a half on a bland diet of milk and rice, per Sherdog.
That friction — pills meant to help but ultimately the wrong pills — sits uneasily against the familiar arc of the fighter’s career. Makhachev was recovering in a hotel after what should have been a triumphant debut night; instead, he was vomiting, ingesting a full dose of laxatives, and being urged to induce vomiting. “And he suddenly goes, 'Stop. I gave you the wrong pills, throw up!'” Makhachev remembered. “And I say, 'How can I throw up? My stomach is empty.'”
The episode matters now because it is a newly recalled, behind-the-scenes moment from the career of a fighter who did not stay down. Makhachev later claimed the UFC lightweight title and has defended it multiple times, a trajectory that makes the hotel-room emergency feel both improbable and revealing about the thin margin between routine care and danger after a fight.
The account raises a clear unanswered point: Makhachev repeatedly names a teammate and friend in his telling, but the identity of the person who handed over the pills has not been confirmed. The team’s attempt to source an antidote, the paramedics’ verification that seven laxatives had been swallowed, and the prolonged recovery on milk and rice are concrete outcomes; who supplied the pills is not.
This is not a turning point in his record or a setback for his championship reign — Makhachev went on to a 28-1 mark and title success — but it is the sort of backstage detail that reshapes how fans see the margins of fighter care. The clearest next fact remaining is simple and specific: which teammate handed him the bottle. Until that is supplied, the story ends on the same stubborn gap Makhachev described in his own words.
