Cutting Out Snake Bite

The frontiersman's traditional snake bite remedy came in a bottle, and was shown, years ago, to be bad medicine. Alcohol increases the blood flow in the extremities and thus helps to spread the poison. Now a Florida surgeon suggests that the currently fashionable technique, combining a tourniquet with crosswise incisions and sucking out the venom, may not be much better. His recommendation: cut out a piece of flesh at the bite site.

Miami's Dr. Clifford C. Snyder got interested in the toxicology of snake venoms after his prized dog died of a rattlesnake bite. In the laboratory he extracted snake venom, purified it, laced it with radioactive iodine-131, and injected it into the hind legs of dogs. Most of the venom stayed in the immediate area of an untreated wound for about 20 minutes, Dr. Snyder found, but with a tourniquet around the leg it stayed in place almost twice as long. Crosscutting and suction removed very little venom, so Surgeon Snyder decided that the most effective way to get rid of it was to cut out a disk of flesh around the fang marks.

In two years Dr. Snyder has performed this simple surgery on 32 patients, five bitten by cottonmouth moccasins and 27 by rattlesnakes. All have recovered. Obviously, excising a piece of flesh up to the size of a silver dollar is not practical in the head and neck region, Dr. Snyder concedes in the A.M.A. Journal, but most snake bites are on the hands, arms and legs.

Immediate first aid for snake bite still consists of applying a tourniquet between the wound and the heart--slack enough, says Dr. Snyder, for a finger to pass between the bandage and the limb. Then a dash to the hospital, where antivenom is given after the surgery. If a hunter is hours away from a hospital, he may even be able to perform the emergency surgery himself, because snake venom acts as a mild local anesthetic and leaves the bite area numb.

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