On my recent trip to Mexico I heard of one story, folklore, that caught my attention. According to many rural areas around Mexico it is said that upon drinking the blood of an iguana, your vision is restored back to 20/20. I would have dismissed this story if it wasn’t for the fact that my eyes are going at my young age. I’m not really the kind of guy to dive right into the pool, so I want some facts on this iguana blood. It is said that upon finishing up a glass of the blood you will go into this horrible dizzy spell, along with the feeling of the nauseousness that you get when you first get a pair of glass, or only put one contact lense in. After that brief instant, you are o have better vision in a matter of minutes. This one thing I noticed back in my early youth was that if you hold your breathe long enough while pushing, or contracting the neck muscles, aka pushing blood into your head. I experienced a very brief, but very noticable change in my vision, I was actually able to see better, although only for an instant. Afterwich I got really dizzy and had to sit down. Now I have come up with one good educated guess on why the iguana blood really might work:
Upon finishing up the glass of blood, the body has a very negitive response to it. The bitter taste of the blood is so bad that it actually just pops your vision back to normal. ( yea I know not very complex). In this case the better vision might only be a temporary thing, kind of like when I pushed the blood into my head.
There are foods, and other things, that affect senses and sharpen them for a while. Thats another reason why I haven’t dismissed the iguana blood. So if anyone is out there that can help me, please do before I drink the blood for no reason.
I’m not even going to ask where one gets a frosty mug of iguana blood in this day and age.
A brief Google of “iguana blood”+eyesight came up with zilch. Just “iguana blood” gave 3 pages of ways to care for your pet iguana. So if the blood does have some properties, they’re not at all well documented which leads me to believe that it has no properties at all.
Anyway, many eyesight problems stem from the eye being slightly mishapened or actual damage to the lens. I don’t see where a glass o’ iguana blood is going to change that. If it’s just the bitter taste, there’s plenty of nasty things you can stick in your mouth and see if your eyesight improves.
Not to sound too much like a smart ass, but…
If you hit your testicles repeatedly with a hammer, you won’t notice your visual problems much, until the pain subsides.
From the OP description, drinking iguana blood sounds like it is going for a similar effect.
I would suppose if you can see well enough to chase down an iguana, your vision isn’t as bad as it could be.
Glasses don’t help?
Macular (?) degeneration is a problem that I don’t beleive there’s a cure for yet, but I don’t believe it hits “young” people. Retinal separation can be fixed, but (though IAMAD) this whole idea about “if you hold your breathe long enough while pushing, or contracting the neck muscles, aka pushing blood into your head” sounds like it could make such a condition a lot worse.
This is a complete myth. There is no mechanism I can imagine that would have the proposed effects on vision. There is nothing at all unusual about iguana blood - in composition it would be pretty much like chicken blood. There is no reason it should be bitter. Iguana is a very popular dish in parts of Latin America, and yes, everyone says it tastes “like chicken.” If the blood was bitter, the flesh would be also. If you are curious, try drinking a big glass of chicken blood first.
Aren’t iguanas cold bloded and chicken hot bloded??
Anyway, in ref to the OP, if I were you I’d try it, at least, if it doesn’t work it can always be a fun story to tell your grandchildren when you’re older…
So what? That doesn’t mean their blood chemistry is that different. There are some differences in some blood components and other characteristics, but nothing that would make iguana blood taste particularly different from chicken blood.
Around Mexico I also noticed that a large quanitity of people still believe in witchcraft, and witch doctors and all that stuff. This has opened the door to many of those fake ones, like the removing tumor without scars, and the good person bad person egg trick.
Now this doesn’t have much to do with what we are talking about. But despite all the fake witch doctors, there are still some men and women that take the practice very seriously. And many people do believe that they have been helped by what the doctors have done.
Many of today’s “real” witch doctors get there information from past sources; books, stories, parents and grandparents.
Anyway my final point of this is that most beliefs now come from past ones. And the beliefs are still around today is because many think they are true. Since most of us here have agreed that the iguana blood has no benefits, I still want to know why anyone would think it does.
I don’t know about that. I saw a movie recently about a near-sighted guy who got bitten by a spider, and whose vision was miraculously restored. I assume it was some sort of documentary.
If it were true, then no one in Mexico or Guatemala would be wearing glasses, right? Iguanas are not hard to find, and, as noted, they are actually eaten with some frequency, so obtaining iguana blood should not be an issue.
Even if no one could get it past the FDA, the folks south of the Rio Grande should be able to improve their vision.
As to your own experiences with trying to make your eyes pop out of your skull: The quality of the eye’s vision (ignoring cataracts and other issues with the lens) is a function of the ability to use the lens to focus light on the optic nerves. It is possible to change the focus by using the muscles around the eye to alter the shape of the eyeball so as to modify the point(s) where the light is focussed. (This is why people squint–they are using external muscles to modify the shape of the eye along with using their eyelids to “stop down” their focal length.) However, as anyone who has squinted for a long time will tell you, such muscular contractions are hard to maintain, painful, and, at some point, not sufficient to change the shape of the eye enough to make a difference.
My guess would be that around the time your eyes were bulging out of their sockets, they had been forced into a shape that temporarily provided clearer vision. As you noted, the “improved” vision was not quite worth the rest of the experience.
Going where? Going how? Are you saying you have some degenerative vision condition? Have you talked to an optometrist and had your eyes examined? How old are you? I ask because there are some treatments appropriate for some age groups and not others.
If you have some diagnosed pregressive condition leading to blindness that the medical community cannot offer you help with, then by all means have a cup o’ iguana (they’re not endangered, are they?). What have you got to lose? Actually, I suppose some parasite in its blood could kill you, so think about whether you would rather be blind or dead. And then drink or don’t.
That’s the level of desperation I would need to be at before I would try it.
As far as where it came from… Well, if your vision is that bad, do you really care? Did you make up this “…vision is going…” thing to justify asking a bizarre question? Please don’t feel the need to pretend that the answer to your question has some direct bearing on your health and wellbeing in the future.
Idle, pointless curiosity is a perfectly acceptable reason to ask a question here.
I thought all of this deserved further experimentation so I asked my neighbor for a glass of chicken blood. He told me to go out in the back and squeeze a couple of chickens but he didn’t tell me he had two huge geese. I can tell you that if a couple of geese catch up to you, your ability to see the gate will become much better in a hurry. Then I went to the local zoo and asked the director for a pint of iguana blood, describing the expected effects in detail. The policemen who escorted me off the property told me something about never going back, but I never let small setbacks stand in the way of science.
I came home and caught a gecko but I can see right through her and, while ghe is gravid, I can’t see anything red. There may be a dosage problem here. Until I know exactly how much blood she might have and whether I can extract it in a blender, I have to keep taking her live bugs to eat and she is pretty hungry.
Any help will be appreciated, and please answer before she lays the egg. I’m not into committment just now.
Googling “sangre de iguana” +vista brings up sites and forum posters crediting iguana blood with everything from being an aphrodisiac to curing cancer.
I’m reasonably sure that if it had such miraculous properties, there would be so many patents on it that iguanas would have to pay royalties.
I’ve heard of the snail mucus thing but as a skin cream, not something to drink.
Let’s see… I’m already drinking the blood of small children for vigor, the blood of whores for sexual stamina, and the blood of rich people for luck. What more could I gain from iguana blood besides scaly skin? I think I’ll pass, but it’s good to know there are more options.