One of the books I picked up and read this past weekend was Buck Tilton’s Don’t get Poisoned, a slim and occasionally witty book (Reason for getting someone bitten by a Black Widow to a hospital ASAP: “Outdoorsmen in extreme pain make terrible hiking companions.”) filled with the latest (as of 2010) information on poisonous plants and animals (although they stretch a point to include ticks)
The book usefully tells you how to identify what afflicts you (from the wound as well as from seeing the beast or plant) and what to do about it.
What surprised me is that Things Have Changed since my Boy Scout days. You are not supposed to apply a tourniquet or to try to suck out the poison, either by mouth or suction device. These come with big NO’s attached to them.
I’m glad I picked up the book. I was unaware of these developments.
I went looking for the reasons. In research done since 2000, it’s been shown that a tourniquet doesn’t help (and, inexpertly applied, can lead to gangrene). In Australia, for the poisonous snakes there, a much more effective technique is to use wrapping with elastic sports bandages to retard the spread of poison. This doesn’t seem to be effective for North American snakes, but the book shows you how to do it, anyway.
As for sucking out the poison, I’ve always known there was a risk to the sucker if he/she had wounds in the mouth (although apparently you can get poison into you even without obvious lacerations), but a more likely problem is introducing bacteria from your mouth into the patient’s wound. More to the point, though, such sucking is negligibly effective, especially after the first three minutes, and can lead to further damage to the wound and even necrosis.
I’m still not clear on why you shouldn’t apply ice or cold compresses, especially since the book says that this is an effective treatment for spider bites, slowing down the spread of poison.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re supposed to suck on the snake, either. Or put a tourniquet on it.
Seriously, though, the book does recommend that you not try to catch the snake for identification purposes, lest you end up with another victim on your hands.
It’s not the tourniquet I was referring to, but the “sucking out the poison” thing.
Anyway, I was in the scouts back in the Plasticine Era. A long time ago, and al the animals are now in the form of brittle clay with their ears broken off.
Sucking out the poison simply doesn’t work. It never did. A venomous snake is pretty much giving you an intramuscular injection and the venom enters your blood stream rapidly, where it spreads throughout your body. There is nothing left at the site of injection to suck out. Anything suckable (such as venom residue or drops left outside the bite holes as it pulled out) was not going to enter the blood stream anyway.
A spider bite is much more localized and doesn’t penetrate through the skin to the muscle. It’s going to spread much more slowly. Also, your body will react by flooding the area with blood (swelling and redness) which may hasten the spread of the poison so ice helps in for such bites.
Check out the YouTube channel byviperkeeper. The guy keeps venomous snakes in his home and shoots video of himself handling them. He has many close calls. If he is rushed to the hospital by his wife, he brings along antivenin for the species that bit him.
Did you read your own post? Specifically the part I quoted and that I was directly responding to??
But you claimed that the reason sucking was now considered inappropriate is because of “a more likely problem is introducing bacteria from your mouth into the patient’s wound.” Then you described it as “negligibly effective” and added the “after 3 minute” qualifier. If you think that’s why it is now considered inappropriate, then you are missing the point. The first sentence in my post was simply reiterating that sucking out the poison doesn’t work. At all. It is considered inappropriate because it involves further cutting into someone, causing a bigger wound, for absolutely no reason and to no effect. It’s not because the risk of infection outweighs the negligible effects of sucking. It’s because sucking does nothing. And cutting a gash into someone’s limb for no reason is never good treatment for anything. That’s the point you’re missing.
Anyway, that was one sentence. The rest of my post was there to alleviate your confusion about the treatment of spider bites versus snake bites. You said you were still not clear on “why you shouldn’t apply ice or cold compresses” to snake bites even though it says it is good at slowing down the spread of poison from a spider bite. My post was simply explaining the difference between the bites and why ice works for one, but not the other.
I don’t think you’re reacting maturely to the comments of other people who are trying to share information with you and contribute to your threads. You’re being rather rude about it.
??? Most snakes lack the ability to inject deeply (and are there any snakes where the poison doesn’t flow down the outside of the fang?)
Which is why the research from the 1950’s showed that the venum spreads through your lymph system first. Has that been refuted ???
The original objection to sucking was that slashing the wound with a razor blade cause more damage than benefit, and delayed the applicaiton of a pressure bandage, which slowed migration through the lymph system.
We never understood the locally famous Australian research showing that a pressure bandage was better than a tourniquet. Since it was already well known in Arizona, what was left to be demonstrated? When we first came to Aus, dad assumed that the continued recomendation of the tourniquet in Aus must have been because the snakes were somehow different.
