A three-year-old boy from southern China has been hospitalised with a parasitic infection after his mother forced him to eat live frogs to cure his 'epilepsy.'

The woman, known only as Ms Li, had been worried when her son started to show signs of what she thought was epilepsy,The People's Daily Online reported.

Ms Li's friends advised her to try an old folk medicine - swallowing live frogs.

Pain: A toddler from southern China has been hospitalised after his mother forced him to eat live frogs

Poor advice: The woman was advised to feed him frogs by friends, because she feared her son had epilepsy

Ms Li said in an interview with Shenzhen Satellite Television: 'There is a child [in our neighbourhood] who has tried this method and it was a success.

'[My friends] suggested I give it a try too, so we went to catch live frogs to feed my son.'

After capturing three live frogs, the entire family, living in Maoming in the province of Guangdong, held the little boy down and forced him to swallow them - still wriggling.

The amphibians did not cure the boy.

Instead, several abnormal masses began growing on his body.

Squirming: The entire family held the little boy down and made him swallow the amphibians (file photo)

Ill: The boy developed sparganosis - a parasitic infection caused by the larvae of tapeworms

The child was sent to hospital, where doctors removed the growths from his stomach and scrotum.

He was diagnosed with sparganosis - a parasitic infection caused by the larvae of tapeworms - brought on by the frog-eating.

Untreated, sparganosis can cause blindness and even brain damage.

'We think these are not all the tapeworms though. There might still be a lot in his body,' said Lei Min, a doctor from Shenzhen Children's Hospital, stating they will give the child further treatment.

Reports from China have not revealed whether or not the boy actually suffered from epilepsy in the first place.

Further treatment: Doctor from Shenzhen Children's Hospital says there might be more worms in boy's body

All for nothing? It has not been disclosed whether the boy actually suffered from epilepsy in the first place

According to scholars at Stanford University, humans are secondary intermediate hosts for sparganosis.

They can catch the disease from drinking water that contains a contaminated creature, eating a raw infected frog, snake or small mammal or using poultices made from the flesh of infected animals.

Symptoms of sparganosis depend upon the location of the sparganum within the body.

In the boy's case, the sparganosis affected his subcutaneous tissue, causing nodules to form under his skin.

The main form of treatment of sparganosis is surgical removal of the larva upon visual diagnosis

The sparganum worm can live up to 20 years in a human.

In November 2014, a man from Cambridge was found to have had a sparaganum worm living in his brain for four years, in the first case of its kind in Britain.