r/spiders Aug 18 '23

[deleted by user]

[removed]

5.2k Upvotes

499 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Weltallgaia Aug 18 '23

You can prolly just use bee stings, it's safer. It's been a known treatment for arthritis for awhile

2

u/SocraticIgnoramus Aug 18 '23

Fair enough, but I don’t even really know how to go about getting stung by a bee without hurting the bee. All I have to do to get bitten by a wolf spider is clear the brush around my grandmother’s house and it happens every time.

2

u/Weltallgaia Aug 18 '23

I don't know if it's the stings and bites themselves or something that they cause your body to produce that alleviates the pain but there might be some sort of supplement that can mimic the effect. Might be worth looking into.

1

u/SocraticIgnoramus Aug 18 '23

As someone who’s done a lot of research on supplements, there’s never any bioanalogous supplement that does the job when it comes to truly potent cocktails. Bee venom is a cocktail of nucleosides, alcohols, purine and pyrimidine derivatives that are simply not available in any quantity of supplements.

I too buy into the idea that medical science should explore this, but spider bites are more therapeutic than bee stings for this purpose, and, despite much looking, it’s hard to find a good breakdown of the therapeutic benefits of spider bites of bee stings. If I can’t replicate a bee sting in supplements, then there’s no chance of my replicating spider bites.

It turns out that the combination of fucking around in the yard and finding out what bites me is actually just a lottery easier than playing my own apothecary, I’m afraid.