Some remedies come with harmful side effects. Some come with fun side effects.
Get yourself a case of antifreeze poisoning? The side effect of treatment is a hangover you could write a film series about.
Today’s Moment of Science… may the treatment be marginally less horrifying than the disease.
Our bodies are not static unchanging temples. We’re meatbags of biochemical locks and keys, with some keys fitting better than others. Ethylene glycol, the active ingredient in antifreeze, can be lethal if ingested. Effects of ethylene glycol poisoning include neurological and gastrointestinal symptoms, dizziness, seizures, metabolic acidosis, kidney failure, and possibly death. So Fox News would argue it’s no worse than the flu. It’s broken down in our bodies by the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase. The nomenclature may be your first clue that this has something to do with the breakdown of alcohol, and it is. Ethanol is indeed a much better fitting key for that particular lock. No, you’re not reading that wrong. Yes, that ethanol. The one you regularly find in wine and tequila and your Uncle Dave. Not to be confused with isopropanol which can *checks clipboard* kill you. Don’t try this at home kids, huh?
A combination of drugs are used for managing antifreeze poisoning. Medications to protect a patient from the effects of the poisoning that’s already taken place.
But the lion’s share of the treatment? Get the patient fucking hammered.
Ethylene glycol itself isn’t dangerous, but the crap it’s metabolized into by alcohol dehydrogenase is. In order to ensure that your entire available supply of alcohol dehydrogenase is being blocked from breaking down ethylene glycol, you’re gonna have to take a positively heroic amount of alcohol. This isn’t sipping a margarita and waiting for the misery to pass; this is replacing misery with different- but less deadly- misery. If you manage to use up all that sweet alcohol dehydrogenase without poisoning yourself on the alcohol, the ethylene glycol makes it safely ringside. You’ll likely leave the hospital with the worst hangover of your life, but you’ll leave the hospital with your life.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, and a nudge that you don’t appreciate organic chemistry anywhere near goddamn enough.
The same is true with methanol poisoning, although most “first world” hospitals now have alternative drugs to compete with the breakdown processes involved.
Folks, read the papers from the pharmacy, look for CYP-450 and take note, as all drugs that you take that involve that should be considered by doctor, but we all forget one drug or another as we age and the drug load increases…
Which can lead to epically bad results.
But, doctor knowing you thought four OTC Tylenol was great, when doctor only said two and a number of other drugs being prescribed, is a royally, fatal idea.
You’re a little out of date. We use a enzyme inhibitor +/- hemodialysis rather than just saturating alcohol dehydrogenase with a preferred substrate. Fomepizole (4-methylpyrazole) is the competitive inhibitor for alcohol dehydrogenase at the moment. Doesn’t get you drunk but do have to keep it out of the hands of alcoholics. Take a little and it you can stay drunk a lot longer, and build up a higher and more dangerous blood level with a pitiful quantity of booze.
Killjoy. But veterinary clinics still keep alcohol on site for this purpose, confirmed multiple times over.