10 Natural Remedies for Spider Bites

Tens Unit for Recluse or Snake bites

I have had many friends with the same experience. The Tens unit works.

The betadine and ultra sound also have good results. There are studies where people used tasers, electric fence chargers or spark plug wires. OUCH! http://venomshock.wikidot.com/

Welcome to the new old world.

Donna Rocks!

I'd learned about high voltage, low amperage DC current from an article that had come out in 1986 in Outdoor Life I think it was. We'd bought the issue because we'd had so many goats, cats, and dogs snake bitten.

In 1989 I was bitten by a recluse on the calf, and used meat tenderizer and charcoal for the first 5 days. I'd packed the growing hole with one, leave it in for hours, then wash it out and pack it with the other. The thing that had me scared was that it was doing everything the book said it would do, not only a hole 1/4" deep and 3/8" across, but a hot red raised area 3" across with a starlike effect of redder lines within it. I called a fellow who'd worked at Uchi Pines doing alternative medicine, to ask if I really needed to shock it, and he said it sounded that way. We grounded one side of the bite with a screwdriver from the woven wire fence, then ran a wire from the electrified top wire to the other side, using insulated pliers to hold it. I ran the shocks through the bite area, and it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared. The shocks ran only in that small area, more like a little bite than having my whole body shocked. 24 hours later the hole had obviously not grown any more, and in another 12 hours the hot red raised area was nearly normal. The whole thing just faded away, leaving me with a small blue scar.
In 1991 I noticed two little red marks on a knuckle and thought the same thing I'd thought the first time, "Those are just far enough apart to be spider fang marks." Six days went by, and I woke up to a little brown oozy hole in the middle of each pink mark. There was a PT working across the street, so I called and asked if she'd run electrostim on them. She said come on over, and told me that she used to use ultrasound and Betadine on such bites, but as I insisted on electrostim, she flipped a switch and did all 3 at once. The wounds closed up that afternoon.

The next time it happened, it was like some people describe the bites, I got a black spot on my ankle that looked just like someone had dropped silver nitrate on it. It was perfectly even with the surrounding skin, and painless till after about 5 days the surface peeled off. Within a few hours it was really hurting so I used the electrodes from a "Beck Box" on either side, for about 10 minutes. The thing didn't bother me for a week, then it started hurting again, I ran the box longer and hotter and it went away after that. The secretary at the office where I'd borrowed the box used it twice when she had brown recluse bites. We have a Hulda Clark Zapper, but I don't think the voltage is high enough on it. It was not like my other bites, but was equally slow and was working it's way down through the layers.

Then my husband got bitten on the arm and he used his electroacupuncture gadget, grounding on one side of the bite and zapping on the other. A friend got bitten, had the classic nasty brown oozy wound on her leg, and as she had a TENS unit we simply put the pads on either side of the bite and turned it on blast for about 15 minutes. I forget how I treated the last two bites I got, they occurred about a week apart and I didn't let them got very far.
I introduced my chiropractor to the notion of treating recluse bites with his electrostim machine. I had a friend who'd been bitten 3X and had learned to use clay poultices morning and evening to heal them, but then she got a bite on her neck and after 6 days of poultices woke up to swollen glands in her neck and was scared. So that was the first one my DC got to use his machine on, and that was the end of the problem for her.

The one horror story I have witnessed was a friend who went to the dr the same day she was bitten, got on the antibiotics but they didn't do a thing. Her arm swelled up double, and when I heard about it 6 days later, I called immediately and told her to rush over to a DC who would use his electrostim on it. It had eaten a strip on her upper arm an inch wide, 5" long and about 1/8" deep. The wound stopped growing and healed up. She has a horrible scar, but it would certainly kept on eating to the bone had it not been stopped. There are 400 people where she works, they all know about what happened to her and believe me, they and all their friends and relatives will be going to a DC instead of an MD for TX.

The PT who did my 2nd bite told me about a guy who'd been bitten in a very delicate place. The MD's had nothing to offer except to cut out the bite area, which was not in a place where he thought he had anything to spare. The PT, on hearing his story, showed him how to use her machine and had him tow it to the restroom every time he came in for his other tx. She said it saved his marriage. (She also told me about saving her dog which had been snake bitten on a holiday weekend, she applied a TENS unit after he'd suffered for a couple of hours, in 20 minutes he was up dragging it around and wagging his tail. We just use Vit C for animals with snake bite, but we do have a TENS unit just in case. )

I talked with a nurse who works in a wound center, and she was astonished that I know about all these bite cases in which none of their debridement and other medical treatments were necessary. In fact, I was surprised to see that some people do know about the shock treatment. See http://en.allexperts.com/q/General-Surgery-2076/Brown-Recluse-Spider-Bites.htm which also mentions that the venom is "heat labile, calcium dependent, and optimally active at a pH of 7.1." They approved of a home remedy of hot and cold applications.

When I read all the things people have done for what they think are recluse bites, I have several thoughts. First of all, some of them were not recluse bites. I've been bitten my more kinds of bugs than most modern Americans. One thing that will show up in most recluse bites is a stage where there are two small holes, before they grow together and become one large hole. For a day or so after they combine, the hole is often square looking rather than round. Second, some actual recluse bites just got better, because of where the bites were, the person's good circulation and the assistance of salt to draw out toxins, of turmeric to reduce inflammation so the circulation could get in, etc. For example, an old man told me about how his little sister had developed a hole in her leg that ate all the way to the bone. In desperation, their dr had had their mother rip up and old sheet and fill little squares with Epsoms salts. When one was saturated, she pulled it out and stuffed another one in. That healed up the wound, which we can now guess was an early recluse bite. I don't think they were nearly as common before central heating. In my own case, salt and proteoplytic enzymes (in the meat tenderizer) and charcoal did not stop the progression of the bite. The next thing that would have happened to me was the big hot red area would have been undermined and collapsed. Only the electricity stopped it. I talked with a physiology professor about this, and he had two stories, people he knew personally who had stopped snakebite damage with electric shocks. He said that the proteolytic enzymes involved are very large complex molecules, positively charged at one end and negatively charged at the other end. When exposed to high voltage, low amperage current the ends are pulled in opposite directions and the enzymes are torn apart.

One last thing regarding infections being mistaken for spider bites. Anything that will draw out toxins via high osmotic pressure, such as salt or Epsoms salts, will also draw out the toxins from an infection. So those approaches are not contraindicated for MRSA. And if you will dig around a bit, you will find that Bob Beck invented his little box because of an accidental discovery that electrical current stopped bacterial growth in a petri dish. This info has been suppressed, but Bob Beck has put his invention into the public domain and does not sell the boxes so that he can tell people about it. You can find the plans and the boxes and the info online. And for flesh eating bacteria, they are using proteolytic enzymes that are surely similar to those used by recluse spiders and pit vipers, so electroshock may work on those cases too.