Medical News

Facts, not propaganda

A comment on this morning’s post will make a good post for today.

Cannabis has no LD50 (no lethal overdose) 

ANY substance has an LD50 dose: Aspirin, Tylenol, salt, sugar, Nicotine, even water. Contrary to what stoners would have you believe, there is a way to overdose on marijuana. The people who advocate for weed are either making money from it, getting high from it, or are just plain uninformed on the subject, and will claim that it is harmless. While marijuana is safer than most other recreational drugs, there is still a risk there.

Before we begin, in the interest of full disclosure: I feel that the war on drugs does more harm than good, and I think that marijuana should be legal. I also think that people who smoke weed now are mostly inconsiderate assholes who force those of us who choose NOT to use marijuana to put up with that horrible smell AND their juvenile antics.

Let’s begin with a point that is almost never talked about: smoking marijuana carries all of the risks of smoking: lung cancer, emphysema, etc. The lungs aren’t helped by deliberately inhaling large quantities of smoke. This makes smoking marijuana more dangerous than ingesting it.

How about the reason why people smoke: the THC?

Years ago, I was the first paramedic to treat a patient who had overdosed on what the patient referred to as “legal weed,” which later turned out to contain a synthetic form of THC called “Spice,” which is 40 times more potent than natural THC. It caused me to do a lot of research on marijuana and the possibility of overdose.

Let’s start with a discussion of the lethal dose for various common substances.

Benno Hartung et al. (2014) report that the lethal half dose (LD50) for THC in humans is estimated to be around 30 mg/kg. This means that approximately 2 grams (.07 ounces) of pure THC has a 50% chance of killing a 150 pound man. This is the amount of THC found in 10 grams (.35 ounces) of high grade weed with 20% THC content. Moreover, the DEA reports that concentrated THC derivatives known variously as “wax,” “dabs,” or “butane hash oil” consisting of up to 80% THC are now available on the streets; one tenth of an ounce of these would contain a lethal half dose of 2 grams of THC. Robert Gable (2004) also reports that the lethal half dose of marijuana is about 15 grams or one half ounce; however, he does not specify the THC percentage of the marijuana.

The reason why marijuana gets this reputation for being impossible to OD on is the relationship between the amount of THC it takes reach intoxication, versus the amount it takes for a fatal dose.

The issue here is not so much the total lethal dose, but how close you must be to the lethal dose in order to get the effect you are looking for. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (often called “ecstasy”) and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or “roofies”) and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. This makes marijuana safer than alcohol, MDMA, and other drugs, but it is not proper to say that there is NO risk.

I’ve found no published cases in the that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. Smoking marijuana is less risky than eating it from an overdose perspective because not all of the marijuana smoked is absorbed.

So now you know.

However, whenever I have posted about weed in the past, I always get tons of uninformed pro weed stoners coming by to tell me how wrong I am. I am not interested in that debate, so comments on this post and the earlier one will be closed. It just isn’t something that I want to debate, nor do i want this blog to become a blog about the risks and benefits of marijuana.

By Divemedic, ago

Laugh of the year

This news story is right in line with what happened in my family. I got a panicked phone call from my brother. It seems that his son, who still lives with his parents, has a medical marijuana card. He heard his mother say that she was stressed out, so he decided to use some of his weed to make her some brownies.

She ate five of them before her son told her to slow down and confessed to what was in them.

She began freaking out.

So now my brother is calling because she is worried that she is going to overdose. I explained to him that the best thing that they can do is wait for it to wear off. He asked if they should go to the hospital and I advised them that there is nothing they can do for her at the hospital.

They decided to go anyway. Soooo, after a $1,000 copay and 6 hours in the emergency room, she was again sober. They didn’t do a thing for her apart from letting her sit in the waiting room while the effects wore off.

I got a good laugh out of it.

By Divemedic, ago

Figures don’t lie

but liars figure, as the old adage goes. It seems that the number of COVID cases is WAY down. Why is that? The vaccine? Nope. The cycle threshold.

Just before the election, the Ct was 40.

An hour after the inauguration, the CDC changed the Ct to 30, which reduced the number of positive test results by 68%.

Then on May 4 it was reduced for any test of a vaccinated individual to 28. This will mean that positives will be lower for anyone vaccinated. Along with that, asymptomatic or mild infections will no longer be recorded as “COVID cases.”

One year ago, nearly to the day, I proposed that COVID was being used to influence the election. I also predicted that COVID would disappear right after the inauguration. I almost nailed it.

On a side note, my hospital has four COVID patients being cared for by a single nurse. The “COVID hall” has 28 rooms with a possible capacity of 56 patients at double occupancy. There are FOUR patients in there.

By Divemedic, ago

Why stop there?

The Biden administration is now teaming with social media dating sites to release health information to others who view your dating profile. HIPAA be damned, if you have received the COVID vaccine, you can get a token added to your social media page that certifies your vaccine status.

Why stop there? Let’s also get:

  • a token for HIV. If you have tested negative for HIV in the past 90 days, you should be able to get a token for that. It could say “Go ahead, you can suck it, its disease free.”
  • or how about tokens for people who are here legally? A sticker that says “My back is dry.”

Perhaps we can make people without the vaccine wear something so that everyone knows that they are not safe. Here is the first design:

Are those offensive? Of course they are, and so is one for the vaccine.

By Divemedic, ago

Evolving science

There was a time when humans believed that the Earth was flat, and anyone who approached the “ends of the Earth” would fall off. Then science proved it was round.

At that point, it was believed that everything in the Universe revolved around the Earth. The Earth, it was believed, was the center of all creation and anyone who believed differently was put to death for heresy.

And so on. Evolving science is a misnomer. Science evolves, facts do not. You see, all science is, is man’s attempt to describe and understand the natural world by observing phenomenon. If the description fits the observed conditions, it becomes a confirmed theory. As soon as a theory is observed to NOT fit the conditions, it is either modified or discarded. That is what we mean by “evolving science.”

So when Doctor Fauci tells you that you no longer need to wear a mask if you have been vaccinated because “science has evolved” what he is really telling you is that the proposed explanation of the facts that he and his colleagues came up with was incorrect. In other words, science hasn’t evolved, science was WRONG.

  • When Fauci and the CDC said that only medical professionals should wear masks, he was wrong.
  • When Fauci and the CDC said that everyone should wear masks, he was wrong.
  • When Fauci and the CDC said that everyone should wear two masks, he was wrong.
  • and on and on…

My question becomes: “When has Doctor Fauci ever been right?”

You know that your career is nearly over when even the leftists at SNL are making fun of you:

By Divemedic, ago

Lies

I saw this article about COVID hospitals seeing more serious cases.

My hospital had a COVID floor. They didn’t have enough patients, so they reduced it to one wing of a single floor. That was no longer occupied enough, so they reduced it to a single hallway of a single wing. Now there are now only 6 COVID patients in my hospital.

I can do math. The article linked above says that the B.1.1.7 strain has 16,275 active infections. It also, the article claims, is the dominant strain and represents 26% of all active COVID cases. Doing a bit of math, that works out to 62,596 cases. So they are saying that there are under 63,000 COVID cases nationwide.

That hardly sounds like the big emergency they are claiming. What tells me they are full of crap is the same article claiming that there are 64,000 new cases each day. The math doesn’t support that.

By Divemedic, ago

Follow the science

A comment on my COVID post from the 17th makes me want to explain some science so we can all understand why the COVID rates are dropping. When a PCR test is done, the lab is looking for the genetic material of the specific organism that is being tested for. The test detects the presence of a virus if you are infected at the time of the test. The test could also detect fragments of virus even after you are no longer infected. The PCR test is the “gold standard” test for diagnosing COVID-19 because it’s the most accurate and reliable test. That, however, doesn’t mean that the PCR test can’t be fiddled with.

For those of you who have knowledge on this subject, you will see that I am greatly simplifying this material. Please bear with me and understand that I am trying to make a complex subject easy to understand.

When any lab test is done, there is a threshold value that is set, so that any quantity that is detected above that value is indicative of a “positive” result. In order for a PCR test to detect genetic material, the levels of genetic material in the sample must be “amplified” to make small amounts of material detectable, sort of like turning up the “gain” on an amplifier.

Just like in an amplifier, when you turn up the gain, the background noise gets amplified as well as the information that you are looking for. If you turn it up high enough, you get a “positive” result even though the amounts of genetic material are so small that the person isn’t able to infect anyone, and doesn’t even have symptoms.

This amplification is called Cycle Threshold. Cycle threshold (Ct or Cq) is the number of times (cycles) a sample has to be amplified before the genetic material of the virus can be detected. A low Ct value indicates a strong viral load because it took less amplification to detect the virus. A high Ct value indicates a weak viral load because the sample had to be amplified many more cycles to detect it.

So why does this matter? It means our government has been using the rise in the number of PCR positives to influence and determine policy when “the science” suggests that using PCR positives to determine how the pandemic is advancing is impossible without clinical context. What’s worse, is these PCR tests are hyper sensitive because they record positive results for samples that have a cycle threshold of 35 to 40.

In fact, most of the high COVID case levels were due to the Ct being set at a very high level, to the point that most of the signal was noise. Then on January 20, an hour after Biden was sworn in, the WHO sent out a memo telling labs to use a much lower Ct.

So surprise, surprise, now COVID infections are down 68% from December. Joe Biden is a miracle worker and has fixed all of the damage caused by the “former occupant” as Joe likes to refer to him.

By Divemedic, ago