I understand the treatment of snake bite is a VERY controversial topic in medical and survival circles, and I am not an expert, however I would like to pass on my experiences.

Let me first give a little background information.

I heard many years ago that some missionaries in the third world were using high voltage DC shocks to treat snake bite when antivenom was unavailable. Being a curious sort of chap I decided to do some research into the subject. After some time I was able to track down most of the published, and some of the unpublished, information that is out there and this led me to a Dr Ronald Guderian.

Ron was a missionary doctor in Ecuador during the early 1980's and is the one who did the first study into electroshock therapy for snake bite. I was able to get hold of Ron and after spending some time answering my questions he was nice enough to send me a copy of his unpublished report. The report covered the successful treatment of 322 accidental snake bite victims with a 100 percent recovery rate. The snakes involved were mainly the deadly fer-de-lance and bushmaster snakes. Most treatments were administered within 20 minutes of the bite taking place and the longest time was 180 minutes. Treatment was 4-5 very short shocks to each bite mark and the pain subsided within 15-30 minutes. Any swelling regressed within 48-72 hours. The sooner the treatment the sooner any swelling subsided. In some cases a follow up treatment was needed the next day. Some lab studies were conducted on small animals (rats etc.) in the US and the treatment was found to be ineffective. This is assumed by Ron to be because it is impossible to get a localized reaction to the venom in rats. I mean come on! that's what the venom is designed to kill!

Now for my experiences.

I lived in middle Tennessee for 12 years and I saw more snakes there in just a few years, than I did in my childhood of 18 years in Australia. We had lots of Copperheads and Rattlesnakes around the yard and farm. So when I saw our cat, a female Maine Coon, come up to me with a swollen eyelid and meowing very loudly I suspected a snake. Upon closer examination I found the two fang marks and by that time her eyelid had turned inside out. We later found and killed the 3 foot long copperhead that was around her little cat house.

I had dealt with snake bites, at a vet clinic that I worked at in the past, and I knew that it was very serious. I took our cat and wrapped her up in a towel and then gave her one shock from a modified weed eater flywheel and magneto that we had lying around the house (we used it for bee and scorpion stings). I can tell you I have never seen a cat move so fast in all my life!

I wasn't sure that I had given her enough of a shock and I knew there was no way she would let me shock her again. So I remembered something I had read about vitamin C over here in Australia. They had great success with treating snake bite with high doses of injectable or oral vitamin C (the oral takes quite a bit longer). Vitamin C is a very powerful anti-toxin. I knew that this wasn't the way to conduct a scientific test of electroshock therapy, but I was very partial to the cat and I wasn't about to use it as a guinea pig!

I grabbed the cat and took her to the clinic and gave her a shot of vitamin C under the skin.

By that night the swelling had completely gone down and she was back out hunting as if nothing had happened. There was a slight discoloration of the skin and the hair dropped out around the fang marks.

Since that time our friends at a local Mennonite community have used cattle prods to treat snake bite and Brown Recluse spider bite with great success. On the one occasion when someone refused to shock the spider bite they went to the hospital and had very serious injury from the bite. It seems to work very well for pain and swelling from bites and stings even after long periods have elapsed since the initial bite or sting has been inflicted.

It is very important to use ONLY PULSED HIGH VOLTAGE DC electricity, the type found in lawn mowers, cars (a little too powerful for some), chainsaws, weed eaters, motorbikes, outboard motors and stunguns or cattle prods. Power from the mains is DANGEROUS and will not work.

According to Ron the shock works best if the shock is administered straight through limb where the bite is, and then in an x across the bite.

I apologize for such a long posting but I hope my experiences and the information will prove helpful.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I don't understand this.

How can the electric shock neutralize the poison??? Is there some kind of scientific theory about HOW it works?

Sue

Good question. There have been many theories about what actually takes place in the venom. The current opinion which seems to be supported by German research is this.

Venom is made up of a complex string of proteins which has a slight positive charge, and the tissue in our bodies has a slight negative charge. Seeing unlike charges attract each other, the venom is attracted to the body's tissue. The pulsed DC electric shock alters the ionic charge on the venom and as a result the venom can no longer attach itself to the tissue to distroy it. The body is then able to dispose of the deactivated venom through the normal channels of free radical scavangers etc. in it's own sweet time.

The German researchers were able to deactivate and reactivate the venom during their experiments which disproved previous theories which proposed that the venom was actually being broken down by the charge.

The Vitamin C when injected under the skin near the site of the bite acts as a very potent anti-toxin or anti-oxidant, read"garbage eater". It is one of the things our body normally uses to clean up trash in our system. Giving the body a large dose of it seems to rapidly speed up the process of the disposal of the venom.

If this study was scientifically done and the results were "100% recovery for 322 victims", shouldn't we have seen it published by now? I'm more than a little skeptical. That's certainly a miraculous success rate - worthy of front page headlines (and not just on the National Enquirer!) The early 80's was a quarter century ago, plenty of time for the study to have gone through peer review and been published. "Grab a sparkplug and take a vitamen" is not a treatment I'd be inclined to follow without some type of medical/scientific review confirming the study's conclusions. It just sounds ... weird <img src="/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

Sounds like a dry bite. (ie no venom injected)

Not all venom is the same. I'd love to see your source document (or a pointer to it), becuase the treatment for a nerve agent (shuts down and shorts out the nervous system) is very different from a necrotic agent (it eats tissue, basically digestive juices) from a blood agent (stops oxygen from being properly carried by the blood) from a paralytic agent (you are aware of everything as your muscles fall asleep, including the diaphram and/or heart). The only time that I can think of a shock being any good is the last case, where if you keep the heart and lungs going, eventually the body metabolises the toxin. In every other case, I can think of how it would do harm, but not help.

If I had to take a guess, it's becuase most bites are blanks. No toxin. The shock just makes you feel better, and might do something for swelling.

Did a quick google: http://www.google.com/search?hs=k68&...amp;btnG=Search

Several articles, including NYTimes and Time. But then I hit upon this one.... http://www.endurance.net/RideCamp/archives/past/03/30/msg00410.html

Sorry, wish it were better news. Probably a blank on your cat. Vitamin C was just helping it with scurvy <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> I kid, that may have had some effect and the shock may have calmed the swelling/pain a bit.

Thanks for the interesting comments. Thats what I love about this forum, members think for themselves.

Concerning dry or almost dry bites in Ron's study, all the victims had intense pain and all those who he got to after 30 minutes had localized swelling. Might I add that an ALMOST dry bite from a fer-de-lance is very dangerous! A puncture wound without venom would hurt but would not cause immediate intense pain, and swelling would take some time to develop through bacterial means.

The bite on my cat was definately not a dry bite. The site was just above the eye and to the right side of the face. The swelling I observed was rapid, the side of her face was swollen and the eyelid on that side had nearly turned inside out. The swelling had started to move up her neck and there was very little feeling in the upper neck and face. From my studies it seems swelling from snake bites takes at least a week and often longer before it starts to go down. Also when swelling is observed with snakebite it usually continues to progress for many days. The swelling in my cat stopped as soon as she was treated and proceeded to go down within a few hours. The next day she REALLY felt the follow up shot of vitamin C I gave her <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />, however she didn't feel the first one at all.

The report on the study that Ron did was given to me personally by him and was from the Department of Clinical Investigations, National Center of Tropical Medicine - extension Quito, Hospital Vonzandes, Quito Equador. I do not beleive it is available on the web and I have no knowledge as to weather it has been published in the US or not. I do not have his permission to distribute it without his consent, as I'm sure you can understand.

However there have been other studies published in the Oklahoma State Medical Association Journal July 1992, and June 1991. And comments in The Lancet July 26 1986. All of these showing very positive results from the treatment.

No further studies have been done in the US ( to my knowledge) seeing two have already been done. These lab studies were done on rats and mice who are the snakes natural prey and it is almost impossible to get a reaction that is not systemic in rats and mice. So the studies proved very effectively that this treatment doesn't work on rats and mice. This does not prove however, that it is not effective in much larger mammals and humans. All the studies that I have come across, which were done on humans, show that it does work. Also my personal experience, as well as the experiences of close friends show it to be very effective.

If the shock helps with the pain and swelling then that means it has to be working against the action of the venom in some form or fashion.

Refering to the links, the stun gun manufacturers did use the studies to try and generate sales; unfortunately that is the price we pay for living in a capitalistic society. It has no bearing on the effectiveness of the treatment, or on the integrity of the studies, which were in no way connected to any stun gun companies. Ron's study was done with a car coil connected to a 12 volt battery and some misc components which produced a constant, pulsed 15-18 kv with less than a milliamp of current.

Ron also told me that this treatment works on both haemotoxic and neurotoxic venom, although the study did not involve neurotoxic snakes. My and my friends experience has only been with haemotoxic snakes namely the Timber Rattler and Copper Head.

Ron used antivenom as well as the electroshock later on when antivenom was available (it usually was not) as well as large doses of antihistamine to counter allergic reactions to the antivenom. The study was done PRIOR to the antivenom being available. I assume his use of the antivenom was for protocol (legal) reasons, even though the shock therapy worked by itself.

Now I know most of us who go out into the woods will every now and then get stung by a bee or wasp at some time. So give it a try when you do, and prove it to yourself. The story which put Ron onto doing this was a medical journal article talking about a farmer who was very allergic to bee stings who shocked himself on an electric fence to stop his allergic reaction.

Ron tried it and used it because it worked for him. Not because he had stock in stun gun companies. <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> he was out to save lives.

Thats why I and my friends have used it, simply because we tried it and it worked for us. I started out using the electric shock for bee and wasp stings which I am told have a very similar protein makeup to the venom of some snakes. The pain went away very quickly afterwards and any swelling started to subside (I get quite a large welt with bee stings) I also had none of the painful sensitivity to the sting area that with me hangs around for months afterward.

I would have given some credence to the treatment if the mechanism of the electrical shock were in some way denaturing the venom proteins (this is how meat tenderizer works with jellyfish and insect stings – the enzyme papain denatures the venom proteins). However, you state they were able to “reactivate” the venom, which would tend to discount that theory. My question is, how did they recovery the venom and test it to determine “reactivation”?

The use of strong electrical current in various medical treatments has some merit. A European group of medical investigators used electrical probes placed strategically in patients with lung cancer to reduce the size of the tumors without major damage to surrounding tissue. It is similar in effect to radiation therapy in which sub-lethal exposure to radiation is directed though multiple intersecting lines. Where they converge and provide a lethal is at the tumor location. Electrodes placed on the surface of the skin and activated will cause the contraction of local muscle fibers and can be used in conjunction with physical therapy for increasing/maintaining muscle tone.

I am not totally ready to “myth bust” this one quite yet. I am reminded of the Australian Investigator Dr. Barry Marshal, who for many years put forth his theory that a bacterium was a leading cause of stomach ulcers. The medical community consistently criticized him and considered him a medical quack. It was not until he ingested and was able to fulfill Koch’s Postulates (not something I would recommend) that he was able to prove Helicobacter pylori was the cause of a significant incidence of stomach ulcers, worlwide.

Pete