"There is a cure"
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@Jolly said in "There is a cure":
Show me.
It's an interesting approach.
I'm gonna get all medical geeky here, so bear with me.
In the OR, we commonly use drugs that are muscle relaxants - they are not "relaxants" in the colloquial sense, they are paralytics. They work by preventing the muscle from contracting by blocking the receptor on the muscle that responds to the stimulus of the nerve connecting it. The nerve releases a chemical (acetylcholine) and if the receptor is blocked, the muscle won't contract.
For decades, the way to reverse the relaxant was to prevent the breakdown of the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine. As acetylcholine accumulates, it displaces the paralytic, and the muscle can resume normal function. We've done that since the 1960s.
And then, something new came along (this happened just as I retired). A new drug, suggamadex, became available. It has a totally different mechanism of action. This new drug "surrounds," the paralytic. By making the paralytic "bigger," it can't attach to the muscle receptor, rendering it ineffective.
This is, basically, the theory behind using the synthetic antibody on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You make it ineffective, and it's excreted.
Fascinating.
Like I said, let's see how it ages, but the theory makes sense.
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Ok...Chasing a different rabbit....Ever have a patient with an unknown pseudocholinesterase problem go wonky on you?
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Ok...Chasing a different rabbit....Ever have a patient with an unknown pseudocholinesterase problem go wonky on you?
@Jolly said in "There is a cure":
Ok...Chasing a different rabbit....Ever have a patient with an unknown pseudocholinesterase problem go wonky on you?
Only once. She spent a long long time in the
recovery roomPACU.This was in, yeah, I actually remember the case, 1976.
If you're interested, I'll post the details. It was a clusterfuck.
