Is setting fire to a snake bite as crazy as it sounds?

From snake-bite kits to suction tubes, everyone always has some fail-safe method said to stop the spread of venom. Recently someone hit up The Straight Dope with a new addition: fire. No, his name was not Beavis.

Dear Cecil: There’s a common belief that "sucking the poison out" is an effective snakebite remedy. I also heard journalist Stephanie Nolen talk about a man in Sudan who set his foot on fire after a snake bite, which he claimed saved him from the poison. Is either of these treatments effective? — Dyer Cecil replies: I treasure questions like yours, Dyer, because of the insight they give me into the human mind. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, on hearing about some birdbrain who sets himself on fire to combat snakebite, think: what an amusing anecdote. Then there’s you, solemnly wondering: is this something I should try? Quick answer: no. However, I don’t mean to make sport of you, for this simple reason. Although the Sudanese fellow’s grasp of the fine points left a lot to be desired, the therapeutic regimen to which he evidently subscribed was the standard treatment for snakebite for more than 2,500 years. It involved both suction and cauterization, which of course is the sober medical term for setting part of yourself (or someone) ablaze. We’ll refer to this overall approach as the suction method. Minus some of its more alarming features, it appeared in the Boy Scout manual until at least 1963.

Cecil actually goes into great detail on a lot of different methods, and it is an amusing blog post. My snake bite kit involves a cell phone and the telephone numbers of the Kentucky Reptile Zoo and the Florida Snakebite Institute. That is all I will ever need, no matter where I am in the world. Inset photo courtesy of Terry Phillip.