No. You can fix the dehydration relatively easily by just giving the person liquid intravenously.
But the primary way rabies kills you is liquifying your brain, which is independent of how hydrated you are.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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So that's what The Shape of Water is about, never saw it.
Nah that movie was about how human men are biologically flawed and that our cock and balls should be internal in some kind of clam shell like thing.
Happy reptile noises.
For whatever reason sperm cells just come out better when kept a couple degrees colder, though, so here we are with our insides out.
Yeah its the prime example that evolution isn't perfect just happy with good enough.
Also a great detriment to the "grand design"
It also illustrates a funny bit of the logic of multicellular non-clonal creatures: the germ line is the species. The other 99.9...% of you is just a fancy delivery mechanism, so it makes sense to add something seemingly super impractical to the anatomy if it slightly helps the sex cells.
No. Rabies is destroying neurons, causing the symptoms. The hydrophobia is not literal fear of water (like phobias so often aren't) but a result of your brain being fried to the point where you have issues swallowing. If it were an issue of hydration, just IV fluids would be a given, and you would probably want IV access anyway.
Not a doctor or anything, though.
The Milwaukee Protocol is a treatment plan that is essentially a more advanced version of what you’re asking. The patient is put in a medically induced coma and then given antivirals and IV fluids, which avoids the issue of hydrophobia.
It got a lot of press because one person survived on it (a big deal given that rabies is a death sentence once symptoms appear) but this success hasn’t been reproduced with other patients. A paper on the protocol has a remarkably blunt title: Critical Appraisal of the Milwaukee Protocol for Rabies: This Failed Approach Should Be Abandoned.
and didnt they use it on that girl that survived cause she didnt report the bite until it was too late, so it was either try something dangerously crazy like Mulwaukee Protocol, or just die miserably?
I guess whether this protocol should be abandoned, rather than iterated on to improve its chances of success, to me, depends on the effect the coma has on the patient's quality of life while the protocol is attempted. It's arguably more humane to put someone in a medically induced coma while they're still sane. If the protocol fails, the patient is at least not conscious while their brain is deteriorating.
I'm gonna go watch House.
Critical Appraisal of the Milwaukee Protocol for Rabies: This Failed Approach Should Be Abandoned
Well you got a better idea?
I looked, and they don't.
Yes. Get vaccinated before symptoms appear. If you don't, you are almost guaranteed to die no matter what intervention is attempted.
We should make a new protocol where if you didn't get the vaccine, we just fucking kill you.
It seems like this would be the most humane way to “treat” it, but maybe I’m missing something?
Unlikely. Rabies kills by infecting brain cells. This means they're converted into virus factories instead of doing brain things. That also causes swelling as an immune response, which further damages the brain. Both of these result in coma and death. Eliminating hydrophobia and increasing water consumption would not really help treat an infection (at least any more than treating any infection, which is to say, not very much on its own).