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For reference, this is the store link I'd posted in chat near the beginning of the video. The original intent is to refer to the potential use of hog rectum as bootleg calamari, but I thought that it equally applied to Bloodborne given the visceral animation on pigs and the game's Lovecraftian influences.
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Mar 1, 2017 17:12
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 02:59 |
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The reason alcohol (ethanol, more precisely) works as an antidote to ethylene glycol (antifreeze) poisoning is the same as for methanol poisoning. Each chemical has unpleasant symptoms on its own, but the real problem is that your liver will metabolize them into far more horrible things in the process of catabolizing anything weird it comes across. Normally this sort of thing would be fine, because on average a smaller and less complicated molecule is far less likely to do something weird to you than a large one is. But that's on average - methanol gets broken down into formaldehyde and then formic acid, while ethylene glycol gets broken down into glycolic and oxalic acids. All of these in sufficient concentration will royally gently caress your body up with metabolic acidosis, overloading the existing mechanisms you have for controlling pH levels in the first place. And in addition to that, oxalic acid (along with glycolic acid which is metabolized to it) will bind to calcium ions, which robs them from your nervous system/bones and instead proceeds to precipitate out in your urinary tract as kidney stones. (If the acidosis doesn't kill you, these probably will.) But the helpful thing from a toxicology perspective is that both chemicals, along with ethanol and a number of other things, are all metabolized by one class of enzymes. So because the real dangers come from those metabolic byproducts, slowing their production to a more manageable rate such that your body can purge them is possible by virtue of introducing more things for alcohol dehydrogenase to deal with at once. Ethanol is the obvious choice for this in a pinch, but there remains the issue that it will get you drunk and will only last so long before it in turn is metabolized. (And the ethylene glycol/methanol is competing right back for metabolism, so any given dose is more persistent.) So instead the preferred sort of chemical blocks such enzymes entirely, as with fomepizole. Regardless, the central principle behind antidotes is that "the dose makes the poison". Your liver is pretty good at breaking down and removing nasty stuff, just not perfect. So oftentimes, if an antidote can't just neutralize a poison directly (such as by negating its effects or binding to it), it can instead work to slow that poison's effect to the point where it's non-fatal or otherwise less damaging. All of those toxic metabolites earlier are fine in much smaller doses - glycolic acid and oxalic acid are both found in various edible plants (the latter especially in rhubarb), and formaldehyde is produced in very small amounts by your own body as a normal metabolic byproduct.
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May 11, 2017 06:16
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