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Spider Bite Allows Man To Walk Again

Posted by samzenpus on from the web-slinger dept.

Manastorm writes "A man who was wheelchair bound due to a motorcycle accident twenty years ago gained the ability to walk again after being bitten by a recluse spider. 'I can't wait to start dancing,' he said as he looks forward to a full recovery after experiencing what some call a 'true miracle.'" I think we all know how this story is going to end. I hope The Sinister Six have been practicing.

26 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. No radioactivity involved? by R2.0 · · Score: 4, Funny

    No genetic engineering?

    What a let down...

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
    1. Re:No radioactivity involved? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Funny

      You never know. They didn't catch the spider, and it happened in Manteca, California, which is far outside the normal range of the brown recluse spider. However, it is in unusually close proximity to Sutter Buttes, an extinct volcano which would be an ideal place to set up a secret lab for.........experiments. Not that I'm suggesting anything.

      --
      Qxe4
    2. Re:No radioactivity involved? by kbob88 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Repeat after me: there is no secret lab under Sutter Buttes. Certainly not one exactly 322' under Brockman Canyon off Pass Road with henchmen wearing shiny silver suits where several tanks of Sphyrna have recently been delivered. Umm, I mean, these are not the buttes you are looking for...

    3. Re:No radioactivity involved? by Walt+Dismal · · Score: 5, Funny

      I was bitten by a C# bug and now I can spin .NETs. However, my arch-nemesis is Doctor Oct-Torvalds, who has eight tentacle arms powered by a small open-source nuclear reactor.

    4. Re:No radioactivity involved? by Lorens · · Score: 4, Funny

      but nerve regrowth is rare in the spine because spinal fluids prohibit it.

      Guess our intelligent designer needs to go back to the drawing board if (s)he built in a bug like that ;)

      There, corrected that for you. Spiders kill bugs.

  2. First person to make... by Em+Emalb · · Score: 5, Funny

    a spiderman analogy gets beaten about the head, neck, chest, and shoulders with a rocket-propelled spaghetti launcher.

    --
    Sent from your iPad.
    1. Re:First person to make... by neoform · · Score: 4, Funny

      Forget dancing! He can't wait to climb walls, sling webs and catch Dr. Oct!

      --
      MABASPLOOM!
  3. What a misleading headline by jandrese · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those of you who are thinking that deadly spider poison is some sort of elixir of mobility I have some bad news. Basically what happened is that he got sent to the hospital and the doctors noticed that his legs were in better shape than he thought, and with some physical therapy he was able to get them working again.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:What a misleading headline by Red+Flayer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Fucking spoilsport.Why can't you let us enjoy our adolescent fantasies of possible superheroism for a little longer?

      I bet you spend the month of December telling little kids at the mall that Santa's a hoax. Miserable bastard.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    2. Re:What a misleading headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      This just in: Spider bite cures laziness!

    3. Re:What a misleading headline by interkin3tic · · Score: 5, Funny

      You think you're so smart, but I haven't RTFA. Therefore I don't know if you're lying or not, therefore in my world, this man MAY be spiderman.

      I live in a world where spiderman is possibly real, along with santa and the easter bunny. All you have is stupid reality.

    4. Re:What a misleading headline by spacefiddle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Marvelous. One wonders if his damage was gradually regenerating all this time and is now detectable; or if, perhaps, he could have been rehabilitated to walk 20 years ago, had he been someone with more money than a tattoo artist / physical laborer.

      --
      That which does not kill us makes us... st
    5. Re:What a misleading headline by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Brown Recluse venom isn't neurotoxic, it's necrotic. If his legs rotted and fell off, I'd think it was possibly due to a bite from a brown recluse. Starting to work again? Doesn't sound likely.

      I would think it is equally plausible that he fell and it knocked something back into alignment, or he's been showing a long term improvement that wasn't quite to the detection threshold before.

      Attributing the improvement to the spider bite is very thin.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
    6. Re:What a misleading headline by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are completely oversimplifying the article to the point where your statement is misleading.

      And you are making almost absurd leaps of logic.

      They administered THE SAME TESTS this man has taken before with no results and he was able to FEEL something... which he COULDN'T do before.

      Yes.

      My guess is, spider venom is a nerve toxin... it just so happened to manipulate the biology of these nerves in the same way a swift kick to the TV used to fix bad reception.

      Er. No. As you said, he hadn't been able to walk for 20 years. And he'd been in rehab previously with no success. While the article doesn't say, odds are it was a number of years since he'd last been in rehab.

      In reality land, nerve damage heals very slowly.

      I had a wisdom tooth extracted a couple years ago, and the procedure paralyzed a small strip on lip and chin. My mouth healed up nicely within a few weeks. The paralysis took almost a year. The doctor had warned paralysis was a possibility, that if it occurred it would take a long time to heal, and that there was a good chance it wouldn't heal at all. After six months it went from dead to 'tingling' when touched (sort of like the shooting sparks you get when your foot falls asleep), a few months later and it was healed.

      All the spider bite likely did is cause him to be in the hospital, where he was re-tested. If he'd gone in without the spider bite, he would almost certainly have had the same result. In the interval between the last test and the current one, the nerves had healed to the point they would carry signals again.

      After decades of no success, you don't go in to try every six months 'just in case'.

      The odds the spider bite had anything whatsoever to do with it is minimal.

      My guess is, spider venom is a nerve toxin.

      Except that the Recluse spider venom isn't particularly neuro-toxic at all. Its primary toxin simply aggregates platelets and white blood cells to clog capillaries, which causes necrotic flesh wounds. Rarely is the venom carried by the blood stream further. The main risk is that the necrotic flesh becomes a breeding ground for 2ndary infections. Its really more like gangrene than anything else.

    7. Re:What a misleading headline by sjames · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, recluse venom is cytotoxic rather than neurotoxic. In the majority of cases, it causes nothing more than aches and a bit of feaver. In the minority of cases, it will cause a nasty necrotic ulcer local to the bite. Even rarer, the effects are diffuse and systemic causing various organ damage.

      It's hard to see where the bite would help, but if it did (that is, not a coincidence), I'd have to guess (and it's a wild guess) that it broke up scar tissue that was blocking healing in the nerves.

    8. Re:What a misleading headline by Rary · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And we, of course, know everything about biochemistry...

      No, but we do know quite a bit.

      ...and can prove that the chemical pathways involved in his cure are in no way related to the brown recluse spider toxin.

      No, but we can apply a little logic and a liberal dose of Occam's Razor and come to a reasonable conclusion. "Magical spider bite cures paralysis" is not that reasonable conclusion.

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

    9. Re:What a misleading headline by Moebius+Loop · · Score: 4, Funny

      Of course. From the time the article is published until the point in time that you read the article, this man is juxtaposed between the state of BEING Spiderman, and the state of NOT BEING Spiderman.

      This is an excellent a thought experiment that illustrates the problems with the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Commenting.

      --
      have you been seen on slash?
  4. A different sort of miracle. by Guppy · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article is mis-leading, it sounds as if some biochemical trick of the spider venom mysteriously un-paralyzed him. The actual situation sounds rather more ordinary.

    From what I can tell, the spider bite just got him into the hospital, and in contact with the right kind of doctor and rehab that got him walking again. That's a little miracle in itself there, but it's the kind of miracle of circumstance and determination -- not the sort that goes into the science section.

  5. Myth busters episode by syousef · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm waiting for the Mythbuster's episode. First we hobble Adam, Jamie and Grant (who can be the control). Then we inject them all with deadly spider venom. If they survive, we see if the spider venom helps them to walk again. Grant gets no venom. Whether they survive or not, it's entertaining and about as scientific as the rest of their testing.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    1. Re:Myth busters episode by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm waiting for the Mythbuster's episode.

      It was an exploding spider?

    2. Re:Myth busters episode by PIBM · · Score: 4, Funny

      They can blow up the corpses after they die of the poison ..

  6. And it did not take him long to get arrested eithe by arkham6 · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://cbs13.com/watercooler/Paraplegic.Man.Suffers.2.960606.html

    Nice.

  7. The moral of the story by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Funny

    David Blancarte, 47, is on his feet for the first time since suffering major injuries in a motorcycle accident some 20 years ago...

    He said he was riding on Third Street when a woman motorist made a left turn in front of him. He crashed into her vehicle and was thrown over her car and onto the pavement...

    The turn-around in his condition was ironically caused by the bite of a Recluse spider that put him in a Manteca hospital for five days. Then he was transferred to the Kindred (rehabilitation) Hospital in Modesto where he stayed for five months.

    Blancarte said when he was evaluated at the Modesto hospital his lifeless legs were tested â" actually electrically zapped by a doctor â" to measure nerve function. Not having been able to use his lower limbs for two decades, he was in awe to hear that his nerves were actually alive and could move them again.

    The lesson here is clear: women should not drive.

  8. Missing the point by jd · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's wrong with Santa? We know St. Nick was real (so we know there are charitable people) and we know wormholes are real (so we know how to travel around the globe in an evening).

    The Easter Bunny is a modern corruption of the Eostre hare, which seems to have involved throwing eggs at Bugs in the morning, or something like that.

    Spider threads are one of the strongest organic materials known. If we assume the thread could be scaled to the thickness of a typical hemp rope and that the strength scaled with it, it might just about be strong enough to pull building over with, never mind scaling them.

    It's not about these superheros not being possible - clearly the science says otherwise. It's about them not having happened yet. Which, since the tales all come from the past, means time travel will have to be invented along with them.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  9. Re:What a misleading headline- I'LL SAY! by rMortyH · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Most interesting, is there are NO BROWN RECLUSE SPIDERS IN CALIFORNIA!

    People will argue that there are, and they know someone whose been bitten, but loxosceles reclusa has only been found a handful of times in California in the last 50 years, all of the cases were isolated, and all were traced to shipments from outside the state. (great page from UC Berkeley prof on this that I can't find now...)

    A south american recluse has been spotted in the LA area but is not thought to be established.

    There are certainly NONE of these in Manteca.

    I can tell you though, that although there are none in San Francisco, people will argue that there are to the point of absurdity, so this is a sort of pet subject of mine about how people are wrong.

    However, there are so many Black Widows in the Manteca area that you can find several on a twenty minute walk if you're looking for them. Also, Black widow venom IS a neurotoxin, where recluse venom is not. There are also plenty of scorpions and biting centipedes in the area, but no recluses.

    Also, in cases where brown recluse IS confirmed, even in one case of large numbers of them in a family home, there were no bites. They're very rare, and necrosis from a CONFIRMED bite is very rare as well.

    Most of what you hear about poisonous spiders, even 'first hand accounts', are simply myths. Real brown recluses and black widows are just not very dangerous to healthy adults, and the brown recluses simply does not exist in most places where people claim to have seen them or claim to have been bitten.

    I'm most fascinated by the passion with which people will argue against this, even though it can be confirmed just by checking a few books!

    =rmortyh

  10. Screw spiderman... by JCSoRocks · · Score: 5, Funny

    Let's get this thing to bite a pig!

    SPIDER PIG
    SPIDER PIG
    Does whatever a SPIDER PIG does
    Can he swing
    From a web
    No he cant
    He's a pig
    LOOK OOOUUUTTT!!!!
    He is a SPIDER PIG!!

    You're welcome for getting that stuck in your head for the rest of the day...

    --
    You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.