X-Men #203: A Medical Review
X-Men #203 “Blinded by the Light, part 4 of 4”
Mike Carey, writer
Humberto Ramos, penciler
The students and remaining X-Men at Xavier’s school are tending to the comatose Blindfold. For medical advice, they are watching a taped lecture about comas by Dr. Henry McCoy, the Beast.
Dr. McCoy: “The first priority with coma is to re-oxygenate the blood. Check the airway, then apply an oxygen mask. Inject with 20G of pyridine per fifty pounds of body mass.
If the coma is hypoglycemic, then administer glucose in the form of —”
The first priorities in any medical emergency are the ABCs — Airway, Breathing, and Circulation – so I agree that making sure the airway and breathing are secure is important (though if the airway is bad, the mask is not likely to do a great deal of good and she’ll need to be intubated). It’s pretty much common sense, but the best way to treat a coma is to correct whatever caused it.
I vehemently disagree with him about his choice of medication. Pyridine has no use in the treatment of coma*, or in any sort of medical treatment. It’s not a medicine at all — it is an organic solvent similar to benzene, and a known carcinogen. The fact that he’s mixing metric and English measurements let’s you know right of the bat that something is wrong with his advice. Medications are dosed in milligrams per kilogram of patient mass, not milligrams per pound. A person given pyridine according to the Beast’s directions would receive 880 mg/kg — a potentially lethal dose of the chemical.
Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is a well known cause of comas. It is most commonly seen in diabetics who take too much insulin or don’t eat enough food. The treatment is a nice dose of intravenous dextrose which usually wakes the patient up quickly and easily. In fact, some experts recommend giving dextrose immediately to any comatose patient before beginning any other workup as they feel that the risk of giving dextrose to a non-hypoglycemic patient is tiny compared to the potential benefits.
*Comas caused by an overdose of INH (isoniazid — an anti-tuberculosis drug) can be treated with a dose of pyridoxine, a form of vitamin B6. There’s at least one online source that mis-identifies this as pyridine halfway through a paragraph (they had it right in the first half). That’s a rare cause of comas, and even then, the dose of pyridoxine is 70 mg/kg with a maximum dose of 5 grams, nowhere near the dose the Beast recommends.
November 19th, 2007 at 4:46 am
Wow, to see a character like that not only diagnose something completely unhelpful, but something that would potentially kill them. Thats just wrong.
And thats why I hope you’ll always continue this blog. I’d never know otherwise!
November 19th, 2007 at 5:01 am
Where on earth did they pick Pyridine from? Mixing up measurements is at least a understandable mistake, if quite a lazy one. From what I got from the wiipedia article, the most likely explanation is that they were reading the ingredients of a bottle of solvent. Next week, how to cure a hear attack with bleach.
November 19th, 2007 at 6:29 am
MSDS from pyridine:
Toxicity data
(The meaning of any toxicological abbreviations which appear in this section is given here.)
ORL-RAT LD50 891 mg kg-1
IPR-RAT LD50 866 mg kg-1
SCU-RAT LD50 1000 mg kg-1
SKN-RBT LD50 1121 mg kg
November 19th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Maybe she’s made out of common kitchen cleaners.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Is the Beast an In-Network provider?
November 19th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Ah. Not as if Doctor Henry McCoy is an MD.
The X-Mansion had one, on different occasions, on staff, or even on the team.
Why doesn’t one of them make a tape?
November 19th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Another dunken X-men video prank gets out of hand.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Interesting!
November 20th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Totally OT, but has McCoy’s latest mutation caused him to get super-buff as well as blue, furry and strong, or has he just been doing extra work-outs? He is looking *very* good in that T-shirt.
November 20th, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Also, how can he have manly/hardworking chin-stubble when he’s already covered in blue fur? Or is that just a shadow?
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