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Man injects self w/ snake venom: 'Felt like a sledgehammer'
It sounds like a joke, but the article is true. it's quite long too, so please click the link at the bottom to read it in full. Interesting science stuff! Video also in the link I provided.
Quote:
(CNN)As he approached his 50th birthday, Steve Ludwin felt like he might finally be growing out of his long-term habit.
For nearly 30 years, he has been injecting himself with snake venom out of sheer curiosity, despite receiving multiple warnings from researchers and medical experts that this practice was extremely dangerous and could endanger his life.
It instead took some severe bites from a snake -- two in the past year -- for Ludwin to begin understanding just how reckless his pastime could be.
"The pain is like someone has taken a sledgehammer, smashed it on your hand and then holds a flame underneath," Ludwin explained. "It's evolution telling you to stay away from these things."
The London-based musician, however, has spent his entire life doing exactly the opposite.
Ludwin not only surrounds himself with an array of poisonous snakes, but he injects their venom regularly -- as a hobby.
Between his apartment and a storage closet down the hall, Ludwin owns 17 snakes -- 15 of which are poisonous -- from all over the world: a Costa Rican coffee palm viper, a Mexican west coast rattlesnake and a green tree python, to name a few.
Ludwin explained that he has always been fascinated by snakes -- drawing pictures of them as a toddler and soon after that, taking care of a pet boa constrictor. His dangerous pastime, however, came to him a few years later.
The idea to inject venom -- namely for self-immunization -- came to Ludwin after meeting Bill Haast at the age of 10. His encounter with Haast, a snake venom researcher and tourist attraction owner, at Miami Serpentarium Laboratories in the US left a lifelong impression.
Since 1948, Haast had run an immunization program in which he explored whether he could build up immunity to snake venom, leading a young Ludwin to wonder whether his own exposure to small amounts of venom could ultimately lead to protection against their poison.
"At a very early age, I just thought that was incredible. I'd never heard of such a thing ... and it always stuck in my mind."
Over the past few decades, Ludwin has alternated between daily doses of poisonous venom and just one injection every few months. He led this sole endeavor on his belief that injections would not only lead to immunity, but improve his health and make him feel younger -- despite no evidence in scientific literature to support his theory.
"People are like -- you don't seem like you're almost 50," he said. "I really do believe that I've stumbled upon something."
But experts in the field disagree, citing a lack of research. Not to mention the fact that it is extremely dangerous.
"I'm fairly unconvinced," explained Wolfgang Wüster, a senior lecturer in zoology at Bangor University in Wales. "He says he's looking really young and everything, but of course, he's a sample size of one."
Today, Ludwin has started putting his unusual pastime to some scientific use.
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http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/21/he...tion-research/
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