Animal Doctor, M.D.

December 14, 2021 9:08 PM

I recently watched a non-fiction medical tv show where an emergency medicine doctor encountered a patient who had a snapping turtle latched onto his neck. The solution ended up being to give a paralytic agent to the turtle, which relaxed its jaw and released the bite. In a practical sense, how did this work?

How did the emergency medicine doctor know what medicine and dose to use? An educated guess? Do they have a vet on speed dial? Call an old friend from college? Google it?

posted by averageamateur to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

One forgotten detail: the doctor also subsequently intubated the turtle, and it lived.
posted by averageamateur at 9:10 PM on December 14, 2021

I asked my husband, a surgeon doing a trauma fellowship, what he would do in this situation. Off the top of his head, his answers were:
1. Google it
2. Give the whole bottle and figure if it dies, it’s a turtle
3. Just give a little at a time and see what happened as you went
4. Calculate the dose based on human dosing and the estimated weight of the turtle

Then he asked how they would start an IV on a turtle and if you could give the paralytic intramuscularly.

Then he googled and it found a guide with drugs, dosing, routes, etc. and tips for anesthesia in turtles in about ten seconds, so there you go. One possibility!
posted by MadamM at 9:28 PM on December 14, 2021

Google (tm) says there's all sorts of info, including what drugs are applicable to snapping turtles and at what dosage.
posted by kschang at 2:41 AM on December 15, 2021

I used to work with a pharmacist who was the on-call pharmacist for a large US aquarium. As she explained it, dosing can be difficult in some exotic animals because we don’t have data on how, like, every cichlid fish responds to every antibiotic but I’m not surprised at all that there’s easy-to-find dosing info for a relatively common species like a snapping turtle that conservationists interact with regularly and people keep as pets (why? but they do).

So yeah I’d probably try calling an exotic animal vet if possible, or yeah just google it.
posted by mskyle at 4:28 AM on December 15, 2021

I’m an emergency doc. To a first approximation, the medicines that work on humans work just fine on animals. Our sense of our own exceptionalism notwithstanding, we’re just not that different from other tetrapods on the inside.

We routinely kill insects in patient ears by dousing them with lidocaine, which is an anesthetic. Not a stretch to imagine that I might try an anesthetic on a snapping turtle.

Dose-wise, my priority would be the health of my human patient and I would probably make a weight-based guesstimate, accepting the possible death of the turtle if it happened.
posted by killdevil at 8:08 AM on December 15, 2021

If you are interested in seeing multiple examples of veterinary anesthesia performed on a wide variety of domestic and wild animals, I highly recommend Dr. Oakley, Yukon Vet. There are a lot of issues to consider that I wouldn't have thought of. For example, ruminants don't burp when they are anesthetized. This limits the amount of time you can keep them under. If you go too long, there's a risk of an internal rupture from accumulated gasses.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:56 AM on December 15, 2021