Eating Snails

[Brianjones]

I’ve never had a deep fried Mars bar or deep fried pizza, but I have probably eaten deep fried snail at some point, d’ye ken

[Ducked]

Unfortunately that’d defeat my purpose, though it’d kill parasites PDQ.

[DrewC]

@Ducked

I’d avoid any (optional and potentially fatal) activity that required a highly trained professional because in my experience they frequently aren’t either.

You’re not going to the right “professionals” then. How often does someone get poisoned by fugu? How often does a plane crash? How often does someone get a rat-lung parasite from escargot at a French restaurant? The reason these aren’t frequent events is due to the years of training that these professionals in their fields have undertaken, but we haven’t.

[DrewC]

@Brianjones

I’ve never had a deep fried Mars bar

You can get them at a fish and chip shop on Bondi Beach in Sydney (they claim to have invented it). They’re the most awesome thing in the world with the first bite and the most disgusting thing by the time you finish it.

[Charlie_Phillips]

@DrewC

@Ducked

I’d avoid any (optional and potentially fatal) activity that required a highly trained professional because in my experience they frequently aren’t either.

You’re not going to the right “professionals” then. How often does someone get poisoned by fugu? How often does a plane crash? How often does someone get a rat-lung parasite from escargot at a French restaurant? The reason these aren’t frequent events is due to the years of training that these professionals in their fields have undertaken, but we haven’t.

By the same token, we can be prescribed safe drugs like Vioxx and Thalidomide, and feel secure by receiving safe treatments such as being bled by scalpels or leeches by people with years of training.

The peer-reviewed journals prove it.

Eating snails is nothing.

[DrewC]

@Charlie_Phillips

Vioxx and Thalidomide, and feel secure by receiving safe treatments such as being bled by scalpels or leeches by people with years of training.

I’m not familiar with Vioxx, but Thalidomide has been illegal for half a century. As for being bled by scalpels and leeches, are you really going back to the Middle Ages for examples? I’m obviously talking from the context of now… 2019.

If you had an urgent heart issue, who would you rather perform open heart surgery on you? Me, or a heart surgeon who went through years of medical school and has performed the surgery a hundred times?

[Ducked]

Silly example in context. DIY open heart surgery would be quite difficult. Even I probably wouldn’t attempt it, unless I was, say in deep space with the assistance of an advanced medical robot, using open-source software.

I probably wouldn’t attempt it if the software was written by, say, Microsoft professionals.

Here’s my “formative” experience with the medical profession. It isn’t yours, so you’ll perhaps prefer to disbelieve it, but its mine, and its probably exaggerated my attitude.

Those buggers were letting me die, and DIY diagnosis and the Internyet saved my life.

B12 prescription?

I don’t know, and I wouldn’t be surprised if no one else does either, given the difficulty of measuring low-level irreversible damage. A vegan will presumably / hopefully be aware of the dangers so they would probably catch it before much damage was done, but I wouldn’t be confident that NO irreversible damage would accompany symptom onset. If you are a random case, the neurological symptoms can be hard to interpret and won’t necessarily result in a B12 deficiency diagnosis, at least not at …

The neurologist I mostly deal with now is pretty good. He makes mistakes, but he admits and corrects when they are pointed out.

I have one clinical subject and all de live-long (hopefully) day to consider the case. He has hundreds of patients and about 5 minutes each.

[Hanna]

Well? Have you eaten the snails yet?

[mad_masala]

What was your condition?

[Ducked]

See link

[mad_masala]

I saw the link and it looks like you had a deficit of B12 or something.

[Ducked]

No. Dunno if I will either. Certainly not going to be peer-pushed into it by you lot.

Re your poll/morbid curiosity, seems quite possible you would never find out even if it killed me, since death/symptoms might be attributed to pre-existing conditions.

You’re apparently supposed to starve them for a week first.

I presume this is because French people don’t like eating green snail shit (Surrender monkeys, y’know?)

They then feed them on flour, I suppose for weight gain, and French people presumably don’t mind eating white snail shit (Surrender monkeys, y’know?)

I would probably skip the flour bit. They do eat cardboard, though, which might be good for dietary fibre.

[Hanna]

@Ducked

No. Dunno if I will either.

Ugh, boring.

You should make a separate thread for complaining about doctors and only update this one if you actually eat the snails.

[Ducked]

Tough

[Ducked]

@mad_masala

I saw the link and it looks like you had a deficit of B12 or something.

Sigh. No one reads anymore.

Funnily enough that’s emerged as a theme in The Gun Club thread too.

Who’d a thunk it?

Look up Pernicious Anemia

Or something.

[mad_masala]

Well, I think I read the post linked and then skim read a some of the posts around it, but it wasn’t clear to me what happened to you.

Pernicious sounds bad, sorry to hear that! hopefully the snail diet can help with it/

[tando]

Is it so difficult to avoid to touch and kill the parasites?

[RickRoll]

@Ducked

Look up Pernicious Anemia

We are getting off topic here, but after reading the other link you’ve posted and looking and about Pernicious Anemia, it seems you were in a difficult situation. The symptoms are easily confused with other diseases, and one couldn’t find it unless one knew what to looking for…
If you don’t mind sharing, what made you think it could be B-12 deficiency anemia?

[Ducked]

@RickRoll

@Ducked

Look up Pernicious Anemia

We are getting off topic here, but after reading the other link you’ve posted and looking and about Pernicious Anemia, it seems you were in a difficult situation. The symptoms are easily confused with other diseases, and one couldn’t find it unless one knew what to looking for…
If you don’t mind sharing, what made you think it could be B-12 deficiency anemia?

We following up on some “trust the experts” jive, which isn’t really off the topic at all.

This is an (admittedly extreme but not as extreme as DIY open-heart surgery) example where trusting the experts would have got me dead.

I didn’t think of pernicious anemia. I looked for examples of good diagnostic practice in polyneuropathy, which is what I was diagnosed with, and is pretty hopeless, but didn’t seem to exactly match my symptoms.

My symmptoms in any case were being inconsistently described and interpreted, which made me more suspiscious (plus some wishful thinking, of course).

The internet probably saved my life but I was lucky, because the diagnosis meant I was looking mostly in the wrong places, and my cognitive function was declining rapidly.

I have worked in medical research, though, so I can mostly read this stuff.

I’d say Ah Huang, raised in an extreme “trust the experts” culture, would probably have died.

[Ducked]

@tando

Is it so difficult to avoid to touch and kill the parasites?

Should’'nt be. Tongs, gloves and a rolling boil should do it, though after all this flak I might want a pressure cooker.