you medical people on my journal...
11 Feb 2013 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI know there's some of you out there, so if you have any ideas:
I've got a character who was poisoned. Think a milder, survivable form of strychnine (I think that's the one I mean), where the poison freezes the muscles up. He got a small dose, but it was still close, and as a result his heart's going to take awhile to recover from getting stomped like that. The analogue I've been using is open heart surgery, which apparently does a fair bit of heart-stomping. So I've had the character gradually work his way back to some form of moving about, following the advice given post-surgery to heart patients: walk a bit, then rest, walk a bit more, rest, work your way up to walking up a flight of stairs, lots of rest, etc.
However, the story takes place in the equivalent of the 16th century, so well before any of our fancy modern medicines. Doesn't mean there's no medicine, just that the reasoning might be off (even if the end results work), like thinking aspirin works because of humours, or whatever.
Anyway, so I've got a bit where the character has exerted himself too much, and from what I could tell of the warnings to post-surgery patients, this is why patients often take blood-thinning medicine, to make it easier on the heart. Extrapolating from that, seems like the heart would tire out, can't pump but the body's demanding it, and suddenly you have lack of enough blood, ergo, passing out.
Here's where it might get tricky: the medical person's logic is that a drunk person bleeds twice as much as a sober person from the same-sized wound, so alcohol must make blood run faster and/or be thinner. If blood is normally thick, and the heart is weak, then thinner blood would be easier for the heart. Thus, alcohol is the make-do medicine for someone coming to after dizzy spell, whose heart continues to beat too fast.
In discussions with one of my beta-folks, the point was made that alcohol also raises blood pressure. I know it's a sedative (calm down the heart?), and I thought I found something that mentioned it's also a kind of blood-thinner, so would those positives outweigh the blood-pressure increase? Or would the addition of two shots' worth of alcohol make no substantive difference, or would it actually just kill the character outright?
Anyone? even wild guesses, if there aren't any doctors in the house. tia!
I've got a character who was poisoned. Think a milder, survivable form of strychnine (I think that's the one I mean), where the poison freezes the muscles up. He got a small dose, but it was still close, and as a result his heart's going to take awhile to recover from getting stomped like that. The analogue I've been using is open heart surgery, which apparently does a fair bit of heart-stomping. So I've had the character gradually work his way back to some form of moving about, following the advice given post-surgery to heart patients: walk a bit, then rest, walk a bit more, rest, work your way up to walking up a flight of stairs, lots of rest, etc.
However, the story takes place in the equivalent of the 16th century, so well before any of our fancy modern medicines. Doesn't mean there's no medicine, just that the reasoning might be off (even if the end results work), like thinking aspirin works because of humours, or whatever.
Anyway, so I've got a bit where the character has exerted himself too much, and from what I could tell of the warnings to post-surgery patients, this is why patients often take blood-thinning medicine, to make it easier on the heart. Extrapolating from that, seems like the heart would tire out, can't pump but the body's demanding it, and suddenly you have lack of enough blood, ergo, passing out.
Here's where it might get tricky: the medical person's logic is that a drunk person bleeds twice as much as a sober person from the same-sized wound, so alcohol must make blood run faster and/or be thinner. If blood is normally thick, and the heart is weak, then thinner blood would be easier for the heart. Thus, alcohol is the make-do medicine for someone coming to after dizzy spell, whose heart continues to beat too fast.
In discussions with one of my beta-folks, the point was made that alcohol also raises blood pressure. I know it's a sedative (calm down the heart?), and I thought I found something that mentioned it's also a kind of blood-thinner, so would those positives outweigh the blood-pressure increase? Or would the addition of two shots' worth of alcohol make no substantive difference, or would it actually just kill the character outright?
Anyone? even wild guesses, if there aren't any doctors in the house. tia!
Wild guess here
Date: 12 Feb 2013 04:25 am (UTC)I'm not sure what your goal is here. Are you determined to include alcohol as a treatment, and looking for ways to justify persons of that time believing it would work? Determined to include alcohol as a treatment, and looking for grounds to declare that it does so work in this storyverse? Or are you looking for any treatments that might actually work in real life, so you can choose one and put it in the story?
no subject
Date: 12 Feb 2013 04:36 am (UTC)(I mean, it's not even a culture where milk is common, so the original poisoning got wrangled anyway, under the pretense that vinegar would neutralize (at least the edge of the) poison, much the way milk is supposed to. On that grounds I could probably fiddle with things, but this isn't poison, this is just simple "heart got damaged" and thus a bit harder to finagle. I mean, hearts is hearts. Kind of hard to argue the laws of biology don't apply when it's just a human heart.)
In this case, alcohol made for a decent assumption, since the logic doesn't require advanced knowledge of medicine or biology -- just a set of observations, extrapolated to fit the situation. Which means that if alcohol + condition = certain results, then I could always add those in, as well. Like if it made the person ten times worse hungover in the morning, or dizzy for considerably longer, or whatever. I mean, short of actually killing the patient. That would kind of not work for the story!