Spider Bite Allows Man To Walk Again

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.

Comments

First person to make...

[Em Emalb]

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

What a misleading headline

[jandrese]

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.

Re:What a misleading headline

[Red Flayer]

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.

Re:What a misleading headline

[Anonymous Coward]

This just in: Spider bite cures laziness!

Re:What a misleading headline

[interkin3tic]

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.

Re:What a misleading headline

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:What a misleading headline

[vux984]

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.

A different sort of miracle.

[Guppy]

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.

Myth busters episode

[syousef]

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.

Re:No radioactivity involved?

[phantomfive]

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.

Missing the point

[jd]

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.

Re:No radioactivity involved?

[kbob88]

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...

Re:No radioactivity involved?

[Walt Dismal]

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.

Screw spiderman...

[JCSoRocks]

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...