Client Challenge

@ai6yr 3 this year.
@cvvhrn Yeah, and so many bites in my county. Will see if that continues, or if things will get better. I have to work an event this Sunday in a grassy overgrown area and am seriously considering taking a weed whacker to clear a little bit of trail so I can see the critters, lol.
@ai6yr not a bad idea. I mean they are not actively hunting humans and seems like they will eschew a clear section
@cvvhrn There will be hundreds of runners to scare them off, but at least it will be clear for the first wave, lol. I'll pack my battery operated one with spare batteries and blades and do a little clearing... apparently I have two hours of wait time at that location before runners show up.

@ai6yr @cvvhrn
Yikes, we have an event on the parkway on Saturday it ends by noon though so I’m hoping that the temperatures will not be warm enough for snakes to even be interested in being out

Anybody have access to like a one page data sheet on snake bite treatment ?

I don’t know how many times I have to tell old people that you don’t suck the venom out of the wound.… Seriously 🤷

@MsMerope @cvvhrn (correction, the "do not use gasoline" one was for ticks)
@ai6yr @MsMerope Sigh yeah we still on occasion see people using butter on full thickness burns so god help us all
@cvvhrn @ai6yr the Red Cross in their latest R 25 update for first aid is teaching that you can put honey on burns and our medical director about had a stroke because they felt there wasn’t a clear distinction being made between medicinal honey and other honey that great grandma’s had in the back of the cabinet for 150 years
@MsMerope @cvvhrn @ai6yr There’s medicinal honey?

@MissConstrue @MsMerope @ai6yr

yes and highly effective in a study looking at it for wounds. We use it in peds

"The median time to healing in the honey group was 100 days compared with 140 days in the control group. The healing rate at 12 weeks was equal to 46·2% in the honey group compared with 34·0% in the conventional group,"

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2648.2008.04923.x

@cvvhrn @MsMerope @ai6yr

Wow! N=105 is a really small study, but those numbers are amazing. I hope more studies at scale are planned. And we can wrest the patent away from whomever owns medihoney as a trademark. Cause, naw. Sterilizing honey doesn’t deserve profit camping.

@MissConstrue @MsMerope @ai6yr I don't think the patent is an issue as there are multiple makers and you can buy it online from major retailers

As far as the study goes spot on it was a smalls ample but there is tons of other studies as well since 2025

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2025&q=medical+honey&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5

Google Scholar

@cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope It's probably true of a lot of honeys, actually, just hasn't been studied.
@ai6yr @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope
Gazillion years ago (that's the size of the DoD budget ask, right? 🙄), I did a science fair (go ahead, laugh) project — antibacterial effects of honey on S. aureus, B. subtilis & E. coli (bio experiments were as wild as chemistry & geology sets w/ radioactive elements/ingredients back in the day). Details that matter: it was mid-70s, jr. h.s. & I had supervision — local USDA field office (I used their SEM!) & Academy of Natural Science. Real science.
1/2
@ai6yr @cvvhrn @MissConstrue @MsMerope
Everything was analog. The lit review — from their libraries — turned up not many but a couple of articles discussing honey's properties — it's acidic and seemed to lyse bacteria cells. There wasn't much out there, but its use for wounds went back at least as far as leeches.
2/2

@RunRichRun @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope

That’s so cool. I’ve done a lot of digging into medieval remedies and poisons (poisons mostly the work of Giulia Tofana), because at one point I thought about basing my ethics PhD around the topic, but went with the less controversial postmortem prenatal ventilation. (Narrator: it was not less controversial.)

Anyway, babble aside, now that you remind me, there are medieval and renaissance texts that mention boiled honey, or a tincture made with boiled honey syrup and herbs for burns and skin ailments. I wish I had cites handy, but it’s been 30+ years, and I’ve only just had that memory revived, sorry.

@MissConstrue @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
That's the problem with old citations that predate everything being online/digital. And yet — too many people today don't know how to do a lit search in a library, and sometimes old, non-digitized sources are where the answers hide.
@RunRichRun @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
I’m fairly sure these were all microfiche, that’s how long ago it was. 🤣🤷🏻‍♀️
@MissConstrue @ai6yr @cvvhrn @MsMerope
Did minifiche follow or precede microfiche? 😉😂
@RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope There's plenty of stuff within my lifetime which doesn't exist ANYWHERE on the Internet. Not a single mention.
@ai6yr @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope
Yep. Ditto. But we're old and history is written by the winners — see, e.g., Whiskey Pete and the 🍊 🤡. #SoMuchWinning 🙄
Anyway, I have to grift on the prediction markets — all that matters now. 😜
@ai6yr @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope I’d bet if anyone can find it, Tara @researchbuzz has invented a search tool for an obscure source of scanned catalog cards and readers’ guides.

@econoprof @ai6yr @RunRichRun @MissConstrue @cvvhrn @MsMerope

I'm not 100% on what you're looking for, y'all have been talking about so much.

If you're referring to the medieval honey remedies, there are at least three medieval medicine manuscript digitizing projects that I know of. The Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine launched last year.

https://cemlm.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Corpus of Early Medieval Latin Medicine

@econoprof

This was not found via my search tools but rather a tag search on the RB Firehose:

https://rbfirehose.com/tag/medieval-history+medicine/

medicine – ResearchBuzz: Firehose

Posts about medicine written by ResearchBuzz

ResearchBuzz: Firehose

@researchbuzz @econoprof

You're a rockstar!

@MissConstrue @econoprof I believe you deserve easy paths to useful information in the same way you deserve clean food and water. And I think a lot about making them! 👍
@researchbuzz And the fact that you do it pretty much for free and the love of useful tools is astonishing.

@econoprof It would be nice to have a job. Sadly there is not a great demand for sixtyish female autistic high school dropouts.

So I do SOMETHING to contribute. It's not much, but it's >0.