Posted on 09/22/2024 9:58:08 AM PDT by tsomer
The incident occurred about 30 years ago. There wasn’t much hospital-wise between Abilene and SA.
“But seriously, you still hear the claim & it’s thoroughly debunked—probably the result of a ‘dry bite’ & desperation.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I agree with you.
Adult pit vipers can control the amount of venom they inject, and they DO. Sometimes they do not inject at all. (Babies are not so good at control, but they have less venom.)
I know this personally having been bitten by a small adult rattlesnake when I was 16. The bite was dry, which occurs in 1-2 out of 10 bites.
(FYI too, I do have a serious medical background including medical sciences.)
Most bites are pretty bad. “Dry” bites like my bite was are , but can just be a small venom dose that is not as serious as a large one. Those still hurt. (The whole story is interesting, but for now I don’t want to tell it online right now.)
Different body parts bitten are going to behave differently also.
Just because some dude shocked some poor bitten guy a bunch and the bite-ee did OK, does not mean that shocks are effective and safe.
However, just in case testing in different ways is reasonable. There would need to be some type of animal model for testing. There probably is. As always, treatments could have serious side effects which might be different on different parts of the body. They would also have to test different body parts.
I have not read the research on using tazer (etc) for this except for brief summaries that it does not work.
Such research will be popular for animal people. They will not even test face lotion on an animal. They will really love it if pit viper venom is injected in dogs, followed by tazering.
Of course researchers could start small with tissue blocks and tiny shocks. At some point they might need an animal like dogs, They would be anesthetized before testing. But it soon gets very complicated testing many treatment regimens, using control groups, and probably having to euthanize many.
Overall I think it is NOT going to work. Nothing wrong with looking more into it, except that there are a lot of more pressing issues in medicine.
That said, apparently 30%+ of the AMA’s journal publication space (and they have it in JAMA, Internal Med, Pedi (TERRIBLE on the “DEI” issues), Surg, Ophthalmology, Psychiatry, and more) going to vague poorly designed studies of “Equity in Medicine” and related fun and useless material is just fine with them, even though it’s NOT.
So shockingly, Snake Oil may have come back around, and a study on shocks while not the biggest priority in medicine would beat at least 30% of the AMA’s published stuff, that they only publishes as fodder for the next studies, AMA houses of straw. (And fortunately the AMA still has a fair amount of OK stuff, and there are many other good publications (and lots of bad to so-so).
(I will not be able to answer back today, hope this is helpful to discussion.)
If you’ve got a stun gun handy, try using it on the snake first.
Much of the body part being shocked is loaded with good proteins that can become bad proteins and even circulate and cause more issues.
The venom itself is denaturing proteins.
Unintended consequences, where have I heard that before...?
Only a small percentage of brown recluse get necrotic (soft and rotten).
They are complicated if they get big or if they have body symptoms (”systemic symptoms”) like hemolysis (blood breaking up).
Tick bits are usually no problem anyway unless there is a disease carried, Lyme, Tic Fevers (various).
Tazer can probably hurt, so I would not say it cannot hurt the outcome.
I heard MANY , MANY years ago that Argentine gauchos carry cattle prods with multiple batteries.
They use the shock VS snake bites.
Nope… it’s dry bites. You could do a voodoo incantation over them and they would survive. That’s why folklore remedies “work”. These stories have been around for decades.
Or licking toads to get high
So, two cowboys are out tending the cattle herd and on of them has his pants down, squatting, to take care of business when a rattlesnake bites him in the a$$. The other cowboy throws the bitten guy on his horse and they race to the nearest doctor.
The helper jumps off his horse and runs into the doctors office and the doctor tells him to use his knife to cut an X where the wound is and suck the venom out.
He goes out and the bitten cowboy asks his buddy what the doctor said. He tells his buddy “Your going to die”.
I know it is an old joke and everyone has heard it.
Thanks for the replies.
I didn’t do much research on this and my med background is slim to none. I worked one of those “allied” medical services back when. The impetus for this is my morbid fascination with Youtube venomous snake and snake-bite videos. (I alternate between ‘reptiles’ and ‘psychopaths.’)
I’m not talking about “denaturing” the proteins by simply overwhelming the equilibrium between the bonds. Apparently they reconstitute themselves immediately after.
I’m talking about matching the frequency of the current to the resonance frequency of the protein chains at high enough amplitude to cause their breakdown and neutralize the venom without causing surrounding tissue harm.
Though no doubt some of the anecdotes were based on dry bites, I don’t think they all were; the shock delivered from a spark plug is a pulsed current. Did somebody get lucky and hit the sweet-spot with the frequency?
If so, then a hand-held device could be made.
It sure would beat antivenom.
From a biotech standpoint, and some more esoteric data, I would not rule it having any effect out. People think of the body as localized regions, and very isolated systems, when the body and its myriad of systems are much more holistic in function.
So you get bit in the leg, and all people see is venom bad, tissue hurt. In reality, it would be unsurprising if there is not some pushback on the venom by the immune system, and the immune system is more intricately interwoven with the nervous system than people realize.
I have seen an acupuncturist crush joint inflammation with a few needles apparently placed on nerves remote to the inflamed site, which I assume sent some signal to the brain, and the brain, functioning as much more of a central control system than we are aware, sent signals back to the joint which triggered a drop in inflammation and upregulated a healing response on cartilage and ligaments. Probably affected blood flow to the area as well.
So when that venom gets sent in there, it is interacting with nerves and synapses, which are affecting brain responses, and the immune system is interacting with both the inflammatory/immune response, and the venom, both back and forth, affecting the venom and being affected by it in some way. In addition, blood flow is affected by nerves, and maybe the brain, so you are also affecting how much blood shows up and takes away venom, or does not show up and take away venom.
I would imagine that venom has evolved to interact with nerves in a special way to maximize its destructiveness, and numbing them all with a stungun could theoretically thwart a few hundred thousand years of evolutionary advances in the venom, simply by deactivating the nerves the venom needs turned on.
If you introduce that stun signal, and it hits the nerves, it could also then affect blood flow, inflammatory response, immune response to the venom, as well as maybe other factors related to tissue resiliency produced by the brain.
I have no firsthand knowledge, beyond a general feel I would rather go to the ER than shock the site with a stungun and hope for the best. But I would not rule it out.
FWIW we already do both chemo and radiation treatments for cancer that kill good cells as well the bad ones.
Question is, will it work, or is it likely to work?
Anything’s possible. There might be some aspect of the venom that resonates, it seems like a tuned ultrasound or more of a electromagnetic wave would have a better chance. The tazers I think would be too crude. The venom molecules would move, be positional, more. The venom is also not a single protein/chemical. There is almost no way it would not hurt other proteins, though that might not matter.
Antivenom would still be needed because the venom does not only have one mechanism to cause pathology, plus is spreads more of less depending on the site, blood flow, etc. If it gets into the system there is too much body to treat.
Protein chemical bonds do not re-attach when broken without an enzyme or similar process. When we eat they are broken down to amino acids before being absorbed. Our body does not really absorbing foreign proteins even if it has to break them and re-build them. It wants them done right!
Proteins do FOLD and there are mainly electric and other bonds and properties that make the lump chain of amino acids that is a protein tend to assume a certain shape. THOSE usually can hook back up. However as you indicated that would not help much probably.
Have a good week!
Breaking proteins up would be really hard to direct at only venom proteins. A lot of good ones could also break.
Cells are different enough to behave differently, so they can target cancer cells selectively. Almost like cells = buildings and proteins = bricks.
Hitting a pile of bricks covered by tarp with a huge hammer and only breaking one of the bricks would be very hard to do consistently. Similar in the body.
I also think that something like a tazer if used wrong or too much could hurt muscles enough to make muscle chemicals go into the blood to the kidneys and cause kidney failure. That is called rhabdomyolysis. It also can happen from the snake venom so even more risk is not good.
Hope your week is good!
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