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Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

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Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#71
post #17

I thought this a pretty mature technique? I have seen more than once our local vet using this technique to treat cats with large wounds -- with great results by the way. Interestingly, they too used tilapia fish skin, and not any of the more common local fish species. I wonder if there is something special about tilapia fish skin, or it was simply the species on which the technique was developed, and nobody bothered…

Tilapia are cheap and abundant, and the skin is an industrial-scale waste product. They're incredibly hardy, and unlike most other food fish you can easily grow them in simple container setups.

Horrible to talk about a living creature this way.

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#72

In Chinese villages, I've seen them use fish skin, potato skin, various leaves, cooked birds nest, fish fin oil, and etc to treat open wounds instead of pure bandaging. While it's not a new technique, it's fascinating for this area to be further explored.

In a way this feels less like inventing something new and more like rediscovering and formalizing old techniques with modern safety constraints

It's important in these cases to preserve the lineage of where they came from.

There's a tendency to start calling them 'western medicine' and crediting it to the person who formalized it in the west rather than the source culture where it has existed for centuries.

The conversation is bit 2010, but the point still stands.

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tilapia are cheap and abundant, and the skin is an industrial-scale waste product. They're incredibly hardy, and unlike most other food fish you can easily grow them in simple container setups.

Horrible to talk about a living creature this way.

"Fish are friends, not food"—Finding Nemo. ;-)

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tilapia are cheap and abundant, and the skin is an industrial-scale waste product. They're incredibly hardy, and unlike most other food fish you can easily grow them in simple container setups.

Horrible to talk about a living creature this way.

(i pick mackerel at random)

A female Atlantic mackerel typically lays between 200,000 and 450,000 eggs during a spawning season. However, larger, healthier individuals can sometimes produce up to a million eggs, often in multiple batches over several weeks.

it is the mackerel themselves who consider baby mackerel lives to be industrial in scale. they produce that many in anticipation of consumption. Each foodfish humans consume has already slaughtered untold thousands of other fish to grow themselves to size.

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#77
tangentially related: before penicillin was formally discovered, soldiers in WW1 would use moldy slices of bread to treat their wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). This or similar practices of using mold on wounds seems to date back thousands of years

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#78
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible to talk about a living creature this way.

(i pick mackerel at random) A female Atlantic mackerel typically lays between 200,000 and 450,000 eggs during a spawning season. However, larger, healthier individuals can sometimes produce up to a million eggs, often in multiple batches over several weeks. it is the mackerel themselves who consider baby mackerel lives to be industrial in scale. they produce that many in anticipation of consumption. Each foodfish hum…

The thrive because all the fish who laid less eggs got eaten out of extinction. They don’t anticipate anything.

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#79

In my hospital we have ample experience with another technique using polypropylene sheets for defect coverage, popularized in Brazil orthopedics as "Figueiredo's technique", which is in practice an extension of common techinques for temporary closure of abdominal wall ("Bogota's bag"). We put a transparent polypropylene sheet as skin replacement, suture it directly to the skin. We can monitor the wound and its secret…

Modern medicine is pretty metal.

Re: Doctors in Brazil using tilapia fish skin to treat burn victims (2017)

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible to talk about a living creature this way.

"Fish are friends, not food"—Finding Nemo. ;-)

"It's okay to eat fish

'cause they don't have any feelings" - Something in the way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg5behq8PlM

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