But seriously, you still hear the claim & it's thoroughly debunked--probably the result of a 'dry bite' & desperation. But could it have actually worked because of the shock was administered at some particular frequency that some original subject serendipitously received. I know some of us freepers have considerable experience in electricity and snakebite and more than a few with both. The question then: could there be a way to neutralize snake venom using destructive resonance at a particular frequency carried by electrical current, frequency dependent? If so, I get a cut of the patent royalties.
I’ll stick to eating laundry detergent packs.
It would seem that it would be possible.
I have heard campfire stories of cattle prods and tazers being utilized.
One story had happened in Brownwood and they had to drive to San Antonio to get proper care. All the way, the victim was getting lit up by a friend. By the time they got to the ER, it was just a nasty bite.
I do t know, but I would be willing to try if I ever got bit by a rattler.
If someone’s been bit by a venomous snake, why not hit them with a stun gun and beat them with a stick?
Probably campfire lore. Not all North American snakebites untreated with antivenom are fatal.
hey joe come over here for a second...
They’re talking about this with corona:
“On the fundamental level, the sonification technique works based on exerting in-tune frequencies of the applied energy and the microbes such that a resonant phenomenon can be created. Consequently, the microbes would vibrate indefinitely under the resonant frequency until the occurrence of cell wall rupture that ends with disintegration and eventually death.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110016823007056
Remember the “Is it real or is it memorex?” commercial with the shattered wine glass? That sort of thing.
As I understand it, most of these venoms are proteins. And electric current will denature and destroy proteins.
In fact there’s a lot of info from NIH and other places online about this. Just search for ‘denaturing proteins with electricty’.
Seems like someone didn’t do much real research on this.
We should pre-shock venomous snakes and head off the problem.
First I get bit by a snake, and then you want to raze me (bro)? No f’ing thanks.
The argument made in the Outdoor Life articles many years ago was that the body had one state of charge and the venom had the opposite charge so it more or less stuck together like a magnet. The electrical charge broke those bonds and allowed the venom to go systemic so that it was diluted and the body was better able to deal with that.
They “documented” people in 3rd world countries that normally would have died enroute to the hospital many hours away being saved by using a sparkplug lead off of a car.
My plan is just to never get bit.
“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.
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.
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.