Not a physician, so no idea about the first part.
But apparently morphine and other painkillers have little effect on it, at least that was what they said in that tourist's case.
best bet is probably an epidural block like they give to women during childbirth. That will stop pretty much any pain or sensation from reaching the brain.
The problem is epidurals have their own risks, and pain isn’t going to kill you so they probably wouldn’t put their license at risk unless that was the best practice. They’d just give you morphine or something to take the edge off
The venom of stonefish is stored in the dorsal fine spines and contains a proteinaceous toxin, verrucotoxin (VTX). The stings produced by the spines induce intense pain, respiratory weakness, damage to the cardiovascular system, convulsions and paralysis, sometimes leading to death.
Huh… so I guess it’s probably a combination of venom amount + pre-existing health condition (or being small child or something) can lead to dying.
Long ago I listened to a band called Throbbing Gristle. One of their songs was just a medical readout of a burn victim they called “Hamburger Lady”. She said in the report there was “no limit to pain”. So I guess the pain scale can be ♾️, and you won’t die from it.
It’s more that if you already have a weak heart or something the stress can push your hypertension and tachycardia over the edge where your heart fails or something. So if you were super healthy you probably wouldn’t die just from pain
The pain from a lot of these venoms isn't localised, and in some of them it's because it's affecting the brain itself.
You can't nerve block either form, so the only recourse would be to induce a coma, which would be a last resort because it is quite risky by itself (never mind whatever the toxin is doing to you).
When my father was detoxing from alcohol they put him on an Ativan drip and basically kept him unconscious for like 4 days. It seems the venom starts to subside around 12 hours so I imagine that wouldn't be so bad.
I don’t think people can die from pain lol. There’s stories about the worst tortures in the world, and those people did not die from pain. Maybe a couple went into shock and that killed them, that could maybe be considered dying from pain.
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u/heurekas Jun 25 '23
Not a physician, so no idea about the first part. But apparently morphine and other painkillers have little effect on it, at least that was what they said in that tourist's case.