Don't pee on a jellyfish sting, and other venom no-nos

Yeah but its about as reliable as it gets without seeing the spider. And in my experience with other dangerous things (bees murder me) if they hit twice you get two welts. That single welt, two punctures thing is unique to bugs with fangs. Though IIRC centipedes count on that front too, so its a muddy situation.

Or it’s a horribly fucking big spider and you should just burn down the house and move.

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I’m glade you got rid of them, but watch out for a return. Their eggs are fairly resilient, and “natural” pesticide free approaches like diatomaceous earth and silica don’t do much of anything to them. 2 weeks or more after you’re last fully fed bed bug dies you see all those hidden eggs hatched. And live ones can squirrel themselves away in some out of the way places. Having lived through the high period of NYC’s bedbug boom, before anyone had figured out how to deal with them, the spray and bag approach is just about the only reliable method anyone I’ve met has ever found. All the BS bedbug sniffing dogs, special dirt, weird steam cleaning devices etc. They just push the bedbugs else where to re-infest later. Even spot treating one apartment at a time didn’t work out well for my land lords. The infestation just jumped to the nearest unsprayed unit. And they weren’t fucking around. Each infested unit got sprayed once a week for at least a month, with spot checks by an exterminator once a month for a while afterwards. They ended up spraying the whole building in the end.

So just keep an eye out.

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That’s the thing, it’s STILL beyond unreliable unless you’re aware it happened and find the smushed spider in the appropriate location. The rate of spiders biting people unless they’re in the process of being squished is pretty much nil, meanwhile there are hordes of other arthropods that are happy to take a nibble, many specialize on us and others are mammal generalists.

When 99.9+% of bites are from other arthropods then even ‘two marks close together’ is STILL most likely to mean another arthropod or some non-bug-related source. And given how many times people have gone to the doctor describing exactly that scenario and found out it’s MSRA…especially with arachnophobia rampant and conformation bias such a player in how our brains work…it’s barely even worth thinking about.

It’s kind of like seeing a crop circle and thinking ‘aliens’ when we know that they’re invariably human made and it’d be a really silly thing for an alien to do. It doesn’t mean that an alien with a sense of humor might not have been left here by an annoyed spouse…but that’s not the default. :wink:

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There are dangerous millipedes?

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They won’t bite you, but there are plenty you don’t want to snuggle with. They won’t kill you, but you can get some nasty burns and skin damage.

This lovely little fella smells like almonds! You know what that means if it’s not an almond.

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There used to be 7+ ft ones way back in the day.

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I got bit by a small black spider the other night, for reals. I saw it on a small blanket; l lifted up the blanket and it must’ve fallen on me. It did hurt, not right away but after five minutes or so. I looked it up and figured out it was neither brown recluse nor a black widow. So I put some ice on it and some antihistamine cream and the pain went away after a couple of hours. I can’t testify as to what the bite marks looked like unfortunately because it was in a location where I could not see it directly :spider::full_moon_with_face:

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Apparently there were hallucinogenic ones in the more recent past:

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Most of the first aid info out there for snakebite says just be still and wait for help, if possible. In some cases I’ve read that a compression bandage (like an ace bandage) applied over a wider area “upstream” may help slow the spread of venom through the lymph system. Tourniquets and similar narrow-band applications make things worse by constricting blood flow.

Suction tools like the cups and syringes in the snakebite kits can cause tissue damage around the bite area. It’s a hard thing to study, but the limited data suggests that very little venom is ever extracted by suction. In North America, secondary infection is as big a risk as damage from the actual venom. Minimizing tissue damage at the bite site goes a long way toward controlling damage from a secondary infection. A large percentage of North American snake bites are “dry,” which is to say that no venom is injected. This is true even with venomous snakes. I read recently that 50% of Copperhead bites are dry, for instance. In that case it’s just a puncture wound. Digging around in a puncture would with non-sterile gear is a bad idea.

This thread has a surprising amount of fetish talk. Who would have thought there was a connection between this topic and all the kinks of the world? But THERE IS! The suction cups in snakebite kits are popular as sex toys. I learned this from Amazon reviews. My impression is that this is why they still sell so well.

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Amazon reviews, eh. Whatever you say, buddy. :wink:

Actually, I heard about that from this comic by the great Lucy Bellwood on ohjoysextoy.
WARNING: This link and the whole ohjoysextoy site, on a scale of 0=SFW to 10, are about NSFW9, although it’s all in cartoon form.

[searches out old Cutter kit, logs in on ebay]

Snakebite kits used to have potassium permanganate in them. Not really all that effective at drawing venom out of the lymphatic system, but a fantastic oxidizer. These days you have to go to a pool supply place. Mix it up with some glycerin or better yet powdered magnesium and/or brake fluid.

hello fbi nothing to see here

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As an RN I can say people will put up with some of the most horrifying sores and wounds. I’ve had people come in that said their back hurt only to find they had a wound on their back that had tunneled to the bone. The myth that urine cures jelly fish stings is so prevalent that even some Nurses and Doctors thought it was true.

If bit by a snake just stay calm and go strait to the hospital. It’s much faster than 911 and this is not really a ambulance emergency.

Different strokes for different folks, is what I was told.

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Just don’t use jellyfish sting as an excuse. Problem solved!

Mmmhmm, go on…

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aren’t those polychaetes?