Fish skin helped bears burned in the Thomas Fire get back on their feet | Hacker News Reader

Fish skin helped bears burned in the Thomas Fire get back on their feet

sanluisobispo.com

40 pointsDoreenMichele13 comments

A short video of doctors treating burned people with fish skin: http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-latin-america-40054374/can-...

And an article about the same team: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-brazil-burns/brazi...

I also was amazed to read of durable clothing made from fish skin: "The Secret Language of Salmon Skin Coats" ... https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/secret-language-...

The doctor in the video said fish skin is good for healing burns because it's very similar to human skin. Is the mechanism leaching nutrients or entire layers of tissue from the fish skin to your skin? As in, replacing your skin with fish skin?

It uses fish skin as a source of nutrients, not as a replacement.

acupuncture? it's quite interesting that even animals suffer from placebo, despite us not believing they have cognitive ability to understand someone is doing a "medical procedure" to fix their ailment.

You're getting confused with homeopathy, I think.

Acupuncture is placebo given all the available evidence.

Just FYI: acupuncture is when you inject needles into the skin to stimulate the nerves underneath. You don't need to believe in them to feel the effect.

Think of it as a very subtle massage.

It's no better than placebo given all the available evidence.

There’s debate in the medical community whether acupuncture actually works or is a placebo...

But yea, it does seem weird to do it on bears

Is there a debate informed by decent evidence, though? As far as I know, no high-quality study has ever shown acupuncture to significantly outperform sham acupuncture, let alone outperform usual care. In my experience, studies cited by lay acupuncture advocates are usually either preliminary types of studies (uncontrolled or unsuitable control intervention, non-randomized, small N) or actually involve doing something other than acupuncture, such as running an electrical current through the needles.

There have been cases where acupuncture combined with some "proven" treatment does better than that proven treatment. IMO, that just puts doubt into the efficacy of that proven treatment.

Any serious disease, like cancer, skin burns, severe pain, there is no evidence it's better than placebo.

Maybe accupuncture, in this case, operates in the same area as horse whispering, exercising trust by engaging awareness and attenuating hostility. Operant conditioning has lots of animal applications.

They can’t subject them to tranquilizers for weeks, and the pain leaves the injured animals restless, so they have to be dealt with, while fully lucid and agitated by their injuries. Familiarizing wild animals with being handled, even while in pain, and for the purpose of carrying out possibly painful procedures, has a unique set of problems to solve.

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