Medical Questions I'd Like Answered...

[Thaluikhain]

Apart from pregnancy (and perhaps rapid weight changes) what can cause a belly button to change size and/or shape?

[Username17]

Apart from pregnancy (and perhaps rapid weight changes) what can cause a belly button to change size and/or shape?

Umbilical hernias are pretty common. They also get infected and inflamed a lot more than people expect.

-Username17

[Prak]

Hey, here's a dumb question I could use an answer to-

Last week I started a new prescription of methylphenidate (generic for ritalin)

I also picked up a six pack of Angry Orchard, and no one said a fucking thing to me about not drinking alcohol while using methylphenidate.

Fortunately, I try to restrict myself to no more than two drinks in a night, so last night I only had two ciders, and angry orchard is 5% abv.

But, that leaves me the question- how much alcohol is too much in a case like this? I have two more ciders in my fridge, and would like to not have to choose between my add med and not leaving two bottles of something I like sitting in the back of my fridge, but also, I want to know if "an occasional beer or the like is alright" or "any alcohol at all is a bad idea."

[Zaranthan]

It looks like the warning against mixing Ritalin and booze is like the warning against drinking vodka and red bull: the pills make you feel sober, so people drink like demons and poison themselves. If you're drinking in moderation anyway, you should be fine.

[erik]

Call your doctor's office that prescribed them and ask how much you should limit yourself to. They would be the ones to know if there's other factors that would need to be taken into account.

[Prak]

Yeah, I'll talk to my doctor, but also, I'm pretty sure that interaction is responsible for the depressive episode that made me say "fuck work" yesterday, so... I think I'm just going to be safe for a little bit.

[Zaranthan]

Also a possibility. Alcohol disables your emotional brakes, and Ritalin makes your brain go faster, so it's easy to slip into a negative mental state and get stuck there.

[Thaluikhain]

Not sure if this is the right thread, and I doubt in anyone has the answer off the top of their head.

But suppose a drug smuggler carrying about a kilogram of heroin was eaten by a T-Rex, how fast would the drug start affecting the dinosaur enough to allow the other smugglers to get out of their hole and run away?

Had something of a weird dream recently.

[deaddmwalking]

So, different species are affected differently by various chemicals. Since there are no dinosaurs extant there have been no studies on opioids on dinosaurs.

But there have been studies of both reptiles and birds.

Opioid receptors are highly conserved across vertebrate species,8,9 but opioid drugs have a wide range of efficacy among different reptiles. For example, μ-opioid receptor agonist drugs increase noxious thermal withdrawal latencies in crocodiles,10 as well as in bearded dragons and red-eared slider turtles.11,12 However, buprenorphine (a partial μ-opioid receptor agonist) does not increase noxious thermal withdrawal latencies in red-eared slider turtles.13 Likewise, butorphanol (a κ-opioid receptor antagonist and partial μ-opioid receptor agonist-antagonist) does not provide thermal antinociception in bearded dragons,12 red-eared slider turtles,11 or green iguanas.14 Surprisingly, there are no reports of studies4,5,12 demonstrating robust analgesic efficacy for any drug in snakes to our knowledge.

Source

This seems to indicate that there'd be a high likelihood that opioids would have an effect. Since T-Rex is probably more closely related to birds than to reptiles, I'd lean toward believing that the T-Rex would be more social; they might engage in increased reproductive behavior:

There are several brain regions in which the activation of mu opioid receptors can induce reward and analgesia. One such region is the medial preoptic nucleus (mPOA; often referred to as POM in birds) (Tseng et al., 1980; Tseng and Wang, 1992), which has been implicated strongly in the regulation of the affective state associated with birdsong (Riters, 2012; Riters et al., 2017). It is well known across vertebrates that the mPOA stimulates goal-directed, sexually motivated behaviors, including sexually motivated birdsong (Riters and Ball, 1999; Alger and Riters, 2006; Alger et al., 2009). However, this region also appears to play a role in non-sexual vocal-social interactions in flocks of male starlings. In contrast to the inhibition of sexually motivated song by mPOA, lesions of the mPOA tend to promote song in flocks in non-breeding male starlings (Alger and Riters, 2006). In mPOA, opioids that bind to mu receptors inhibit neuronal firing in birds and mammals (Diez-Guerra et al., 1987; Furukawa et al., 1995), suggesting that opioid release associated with vocal-social interactions in flocks may inhibit activity in mPOA to facilitate song in non-breeding flocks.

Source

Basically, you'd turn your T-Rex into a Lounge Lizard:


So, would 1kg be ENOUGH to kill the T-Rex? That's actually surprisingly hard to answer, even considering that we don't have any test subjects. It turns out that heroin is not usually 'pure'. So 1 kg of heroin (purchased from a smuggler) doesn't have that amount of active drug.

I'm going to try some extrapolation. A high 'normal' dose of oxycotin may be 120mg. Globally, the average person weighs 62 kg. That'd be 62,000g, or 62,000,000 mg. So I'm pretty confident that, say, 1/30,000,000 of your body-weight is 'safe'. A T-Rex weighs 6000kg (presumably), so a 1kg dose would be 1/6000 of bodyweight, or the equivalent of 10 grams of oxycotin. That seems like we're likely on the 'overdose to death' side of the equation, but heroin is usually injected directly into the blood stream, not eaten. I think we have to determine how quickly digestion occurs and what is the diffusion rate of the drug. Ultimately, my best guess is the T-Rex becomes a party animal for 3-4 hours, then gets sick for a few hours, and probably dies within 1 day.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Oral opioids usually kick in at 15-30 minutes. The huge OD might knock a couple minutes off, but that's still plenty of time to eat the rest of the smugglers before getting too wasted to care.

[Prak]

Since there are no dinosaurs extant there have been no studies on opioids on dinosaurs.

(...)

Since T-Rex is probably more closely related to birds than to reptiles

Point of order- birds are dinosaurs, and they evolved from the theropods, the group which Tyrannosaurus was a part of.

Think of T. rex as a very big ancient bird.

[deaddmwalking]

Since there are no dinosaurs extant there have been no studies on opioids on dinosaurs.

(...)

Since T-Rex is probably more closely related to birds than to reptiles

Point of order- birds are dinosaurs, and they evolved from the theropods, the group which Tyrannosaurus was a part of.

Think of T. rex as a very big ancient bird.

Thanks Prak, but I know that. The thing is that T-Rex is 65 million years removed from modern chickens, and we don't know about all the physiological changes that occurred during that significant amount of time. At that time, all of your ancestors were shrew-like placental mammals, and while we still do studies on mice, it's not always a 1:1 relationship of what happens with mice and what happens with humans. So I looked at both animals that lived along-side dinosaurs (crocodilians appear largely unchanged for 200 million years) with the assumption that common ancestors/relationships might be more significant AND modern birds.

And since both point to heroin having a similar effect, that's probably right.

But a model based on pretending a chicken is a small T Rex isn't really any better or more scientifically valid method than pretending mice are small people - it tends to produce useful results but isn't GUARANTEED to do so.

[Thaluikhain]

A lot more effort went into response to my question than I expected, thanks.