The Medical Benefits of Carbon Monoxide 177
tugfoigel writes with this excerpt from the Boston Globe:
"For more than a century, carbon monoxide has been known as a deadly toxin. In an 1839 story, Edgar Allan Poe wrote of 'miraculous lustre of the eye' and 'nervous agitation' in what some believe are descriptions of carbon monoxide poisoning, and today, cigarette cartons warn of its health dangers. But a growing body of research, much of it by local scientists, is revealing a paradox: the gas often called a silent killer could also be a medical treatment. It seems like a radical contradiction, but animal studies show that in small, extremely controlled doses the gas has benefits in everything from infections to organ transplantation."
I've seen this story before! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I've seen this story before! (Score:5, Funny)
NO is nitric oxide, not carbon monoxide.
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Cuz only idiots make "whoosh!" posts, so you can bet that a fair % of the time the "whoosh!" is going to be idiotic as what they think they are "whoosh!"ing.
Yep that's right, saying "whoosh!" is not inventive, imaginative, funny, insightful, helpful, and just makes you look like a dick saying "hey everyone else, look, I got something that this person didn't, haha look I'm not stupid because he didn't read something the way I did, please look, mommy please look at how high I can swing, please mommy, why won'
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I've seen something similar, too: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/bringing-back-the-dead-1208 [esquire.com]
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Pretty much all combustion produces some ammount of CO. Far more is produced if there is insufficiant oxygen. Properly designed and installed equipment is designed to ensure the burning conditions produce minimal CO and ensure what is produced is vented to outside before it harms the occupants.
Faulty or incorrectly installed equipment on the other hand can produce a lot of CO and depending on the nature of the fault or incorrect installation may release it into the indoor air.
IMO a CO alarm is a good idea i
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Given the intelligence in the end user to check the function of the alarm regularly, and to retire the device when it's sensor expires. It is pleasant to see that the working lifetime of sensors has been increasing significantly since I last had to pay attention to the details of these devices. In the mid-1990s the prospect of getting the average user to replace a (moderately expensive) device at 2-3 year intervals was a non-
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"Of course, most potential users won't use them, and many will die. This I'm easy with - as long as they die without descendants"
Nah most of the time their descendants will die right there with them :-p
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We have to have them by regulation here. I think its asinine. Not totally, but, this is Boston, the houses here are so old that the vast majority still use single pipe steam heat. The only air exchange beteen my living space and the basement is from when the door is left open.... and there is an aparement between us and the boiler.
Clearly it makes sense to put a detector in the basement. First floor? sure, probably. Second and third?
Shit, these houses have no insulation and the exterior walls are barely six
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*lol* stop it, some people are actually stupid enough to believe that! At least put a '*lol*' at the end or something or ;-) or something, like every single fox news item should have :-)
Gee whiz! (Score:5, Insightful)
Something that is bad for us in high doses may be beneficial in low doses?! Next they'll be telling us that exposure to radiation and toxins can help cure cancer, or that the same stuff that rusts away unprotected steel and iron is actually necessary for animal life!
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expicitely no.
Homeopathy means not low dosage, but NO dosage.
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Modern homeopathy works with doses of nitrogen monoxide? In my youth we just used plain water!
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"Homeopathy means not low dosage, but NO dosage."
Bullshit.
Homeopathy is the usage of (usually) plants in diluted doses that cause the symptoms you experience.
It's like treating a HUGE forest fire with a smaller fire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy [wikipedia.org]
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The definition of homeopathy is that the harm of a given compound is inversely related to its concentration, and once you reduce the concentration far enough, it starts having therapeutic effects. So, most homeopathic "drugs" are something like 1 ppm of a compound in water. This does not count as a "dose" by any stretch of the imagination, as 1 ppm is probably less than what's already present in your body as trace compounds.
Re:Gee whiz! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Homeopathy [wikipedia.org] often dilutes [wikipedia.org] the "dose" until it is improbable that there is a single molecule of the original substance remaining
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With the trace amounts of all the disposed medicines in our water supply, how sure can we be that the water that we're using to dilute the homeopathic remedies is entirely free of medicines? After all, just one molecule out of ~10^21 is all it takes to completely screw up the remedy.
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It isn't really homeopathy. The doses are larger than that.
Like, you have a headache and take a painkiller and it goes away. If you on the other hand take 17 bottles of painkiller, you die. In this case, 1 pill was good, and 17 bottles was bad. .01% of a pill wouldn't do anything.
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Mod parent down to the depths of Hell.
Homeopathy DOES NOT WORK. And this is not homeopathy. Homeopathy is wrong for two reasons--one, it postulates that chemicals/herbs/medicines that cause a symptom will cure that symptom, and second, it postulates that water or whatever solvent they use will retain the "memory" of that chemical/herb/medicine, even if it is diluted to the point of receiving even one molecule of solute is statistically improbable. And they think the greater the dilution, the greater the
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Slashdot: Placebos Are Getting More Effective [slashdot.org]
Just because they're bogus science, not real medicine, etc. doesn't mean they don't work. The placebo effect can be very strong, and homeopathy causes in quite a lot of people. Take doesn't make it a replacement for real medicine, of course, but that doesn't mean it does not work.
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Actually, I'd say it does mean it doesn't work.
If the sugar pill with 0.00001% of some drug has the same effect as a plain old sugar pill, clearly you should just buy some damn sugar pills.
Or drink water upside down, or have someone scare you. Anything good for hiccups tends to be equally good at anything else with which placebo's are effective.
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The problem is that the effectiveness of placebos actually goes up when you increase their price: "Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy" [ama-assn.org].
Oddly enough, the expensive sugar pills do work bette -- as long as the patients know the price.
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I wonder how the effects compare to patients in countries which reject draconian IP law and the idea that big pharma's interests should trump those of mankind, where people think they're getting an "expensive" sugar pill cheaper because they're special.
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The effect is based more on the value you give it than the value that it is given... eg, if something costs 1 money to buy, then you're only losing 1 money if it doesn't work... but you wouldn't throw 200 monies away on something unless you were a lot more certain it would work. It's that certainty that translates into the placebo effect (except for me, as I'm placebo resistant).
Re:Gee whiz! (Score:5, Funny)
Homeopathy is wrong for two reasons--one, it postulates that chemicals/herbs/medicines that cause a symptom will cure that symptom, . . .
Well, the same ethanol that caused my morning headache seems to have cured it.
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Mod parent down to the depths of Hell.
Homeopathy DOES NOT WORK
Yeah, but Hell doesn't exist as well, so...
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No it doesn't. There is no detectable trace of whatever it is supposed to be in their potions, and they are no better than placebos in proper double blind trials.
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Whether something is pretty, or tastes great, is opinion. Whether something works or not is fact. Statements based on ignoring (or simply, having not yet been exposed to) facts should be shown as being such, so that others are less likely to believe the false statements.
Re:Gee whiz! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes i can't believe i still surf this place.
Re:Gee whiz! (Score:5, Funny)
I can't believe you still use the word 'surf'.
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Indeed, while we weren't looking they built a bridge over the water. It's called trolling now.
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You can still use it, but only in moderation.
Pyro
Re:Gee whiz! (Score:4, Funny)
As (arsenic) is also deadly but its also an essential biological trace element. Its about moderation.
That may be true, but there are clearly some very dangerous chemicals like nitroglycerin that couldn't possibly have any medical uses.
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Water in small doses is absolutely needed for humans. Water in high doses get them drowned.
The same apply to cholesterol and most substances.
What's new here?
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"You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or... hot fudge?
Those were thought to be unhealthy... precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Incredible. "
(Woody Allen, Sleeper, 1973)
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I was just thinking you were right... Anyone notice this is exactly the case with botox?
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Re:Gee whiz! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because multicellular organisms like homo sapiens can survive a poison that virii or bacteria cannot. Hasn't that been the basis of a great deal of medicine for over a century now?
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"Next they'll be telling us that exposure to radiation and toxins can help cure cancer"
Imagine what it must've been like back in the 30s when irradiated water was the big health craze.
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Re:Gee whiz! (Score:5, Funny)
(Not an industry shill, just a pragmatist posting anonymously to avoid harassment from anti-DHMO zealots).
You'd better post anonymously. Crazies like you just love it when people can get DHMO without any sort of oversight. You want them to think they can't live without it! It's bloody dangerous! That crap gets in your lungs and you DIE!
Consider this... (Score:2, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, carbon monoxidizes you....
Digitalis, eh? (Score:2)
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or tylenol, botulinum toxin, carboplatin, warfarin and many others. Just because a chemical is deadly toxic at some level doesn't mean it can't be useful at lower concentrations.
Re:Digitalis, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Take iron, for instance. It's an essential trace mineral but drop an anvil on your foot and you're in a world of hurt...
not a paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was about to remind you that the summary only said it *sounds* like a paradox, until I re-read it. Apparently my brain refused to process the line as written the first time. In Soulskill's defense, this is clearly the first advance in medicine he/she has ever heard of in his/her life.
Nitroglycerine (Score:2)
For example, nitroglycerine is used as a heart medicine, yet if you ingest 100ml of it pure, your life expectency will be greatly reduced.
(Actually there are gazillions of examples. Most pharmaceuticals are lethal in high doses, even over-the-counter ones like paracetamol or vitamin D.)
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Spooky! (Score:2)
All things are poison... (Score:5, Informative)
Paracelsus, sometimes called the father of toxicology, wrote:
German: Alle Ding' sind Gift, und nichts ohn' Gift; allein die Dosis macht, daß ein Ding kein Gift ist.
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous."
That is to say, substances often considered toxic can be benign or beneficial in small doses, and conversely an ordinarily benign substance can be deadly if over-consumed. Even water can be deadly if overconsumed.
(Ripped right from Wikipedia [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus [wikipedia.org] ] )
So, 500 years ago, this would have been news?
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It wasn't news to us that poisons can have benefits at low concentrations, it was the fact that Carbon Monoxide in particular may have uses beyond the ones we already know about like vaso-dilation and anti-inflammatory effects. That would certainly be news to us 500 years ago.
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Hence my vigilant crusade to educate everyone I encounter about the dangers of DHMO [dhmo.org], and the carelessness given to its widespread use in virtually everything.
Cigarettes (Score:3, Insightful)
Can cigarettes be good for you in small doses then?
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Nicotine is a stimulant. If you consider a stimulant's effects "good for you" (for example, if they help you perform better on an exam), then cigarettes in small doses could be good for you.
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You can get the nicotine without the cigarette and the smoke etc. It's called an electric cigarette, use your Google-Fu, grasshopper.
Governments often make this difficult to distribute/obtain because the device can be considered a "drug delivery device", while nicotine incidentally contained in tobacco is not always legally considered a drug.
Still, nicotine is not the sole psychoactive chemical in nicotine, readily apparent if you compare the effects of tobacco to vaporized pure nicotine.
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Still, nicotine is not the sole psychoactive chemical in nicotine, readily apparent if you compare the effects of tobacco to vaporized pure nicotine.
Oops, Nicotine is not the sole psychoactive chemical in tobacco.
Oddly I'd consider this an obvious typo that doesn't need correction, but there's already too much confusion here about the difference between a molecule and a plant that produces that molecule.
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Can cigarettes be good for you in small doses then?
"cigarette" is not exactly drug. If you look at the component chemicals, there certainly are drugs in there that have differing effects in small doses. Nicotine has many effects, certainly some of which could have medical relevance.
It's rare that a drug is "good for you". The criteria is improving one condition without undue risk of causing/worsening others.
A person who smokes cigarettes for anxiety could easily be coming out on the positive end of things, if the anxiety was so severe as to risk the life of
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Carcinogens have no real safe levels to the EPA and FDA. Because we still don't know enough about the biochemistry behind tumorigenesis, it's impossible to give an absolute measurement of "safe levels." That's why the government regulators say "there is no safe level," because they don't know what is and isn't safe.
I agree with you about smoking being stupid and dangerous, but really, your post is a bunch of emotional knee-jerk nonsense. People who want to smoke will smoke. Are you now going to tell everyon
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Are you really sure you agree that smoking is stupid and dangerous?
Perhaps you are a smoker?
You guys should really stop with the far-fetched car analogies: comparing an addictive drug to a useful transportation tool is just stupid.
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Sorry, but this risk analysis just doesn't work out when put in numbers. The number of annual deaths attributed to smoking far outweighs the number of deaths in traffic.
And, again, you're comparing an activity with only sporadic useful purpose with an activity that has a predominantly useful purpose (i.e. people being able to go from A to B). In fact, no modern economy can exist without the latter.
But, okay, you can say: it's their choice, right? No, it's not. If they are hooked on a substance that's design
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Can cigarettes be good for you in small doses then?
Cigarettes also contain carcinogens and carcinogens have no real safe levels.
If carcinogens have no real safe levels, what possible definition are you using for "safe"?
You realize that the word "safe" does not mean 100% completely impossible of causing any harm, right?
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It's called morphine, jackass.
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Morphine is little more than low grade heroin, with lots of harmful impurities. Heroin is clean and safe.
Morphine is one molecule, heroin is another, similar molecule that is more efficient in the body.
Neither contains any impurities by definition. Things advertised as such may contain impurities. But both are specific molecules and nothing else.
Obviously the risk of a drug being contaminated with impurities can be greatly increased by the government's treatment of the regulation of that drug.
Re:Cigarettes (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe not cigarettes, but tobacco sure. Heroin also has huge medical benefits, but we can't touch that, can we?
In much of the world, heroin is recognized as being a safe and effective pain killer. It is used regularly in hospitals in the UK.
The reason heroin is an effective recreational drug is due to its safety compared to other opiates.
The situation is similar (although much more extreme) with methamphetamine. Enough caffeine to keep you awake for a week would have a high chance of killing you outright.
Considering the low cost of making heroin from morphine, the use of morphine instead is essentially a deliberate waste in order to satisfy political considerations.
You also get synergistic benefit if you... (Score:4, Funny)
...coadminister with tetraethyl lead.
all medical treatments have this paradox (Score:2)
"is revealing a paradox: the gas often called a silent killer could also be a medical treatment."
Not much of a paradox. Every medical treatment suffers the exact same paradox. Morphine - great pain killer. Too much and it silently kills you. Anesthesias are the same. Cancer chemo treatments come very close to killing you, a small overdose may do it. Too much tylenol? Liver disease. Too much advil? Kidney problems.
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"is revealing a paradox: the gas often called a silent killer could also be a medical treatment."
Not much of a paradox. Every medical treatment suffers the exact same paradox. Morphine - great pain killer. Too much and it silently kills you. Anesthesias are the same. Cancer chemo treatments come very close to killing you, a small overdose may do it. Too much tylenol? Liver disease. Too much advil? Kidney problems.
Tylenol is in the same ballpark as the chemo drugs, as opposed to morphine. Double a normal (but high) dose of tylenol and you can destroy your liver. Tylenol is actually added to other drugs in the US in order to punish patients who choose to take a higher dosage of the medication actually needed.
One of the most evil things the US government does is adding a poison to medicines in order to destroy the liver of someone who takes "too much". The "too much" amount is likely to be a perfectly safe amount and c
Sweet! (Score:3, Funny)
More proof that Oxygen Kills! (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder how this gels with the research into the dangers of giving oxygen when resuscitating people from death. I have a feeling we'll be seeing the new standard procedure in what gasses to give change radically over the next few years. HEX
Small enough or a precise amount? (Score:4, Funny)
Most all posions (Score:5, Insightful)
Have their medicinal values. Most medicines become poisonous at a certain level too, so there is some symmetry to it all.
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This may or may not be true for chemical and biological toxins ( I'm not qualified to tell ), but it is certainly not true for radioactive elements. In fact with the exceptions of a few isotopes used for radiation therapy ( like Iodine ) and some tracers used for PET scans, almost all isotopes with a significant activity are bad for you. There are some theories that very
Toxicology 101 (Score:3, Insightful)
As any toxicologist will tell you: Dosage is everything.
moderation is the key to everything (Score:2)
Hrmm (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFA:
But given the deeply entrenched fear of carbon monoxide as a toxin, he said it is unlikely that the gas would be directly given as a therapy to many people. Instead, research into the mechanism by which carbon monoxide works could allow scientists to design a drug that could act in the same way.
REALLY? Because CO has a scary reputation we'd rather give patients a new expensive patented drug that we think works just like CO rather than just give them a well controlled dose of a well understood, inexpensive, and easily available gas?
No wonder nobody can afford health care.
Mod way up (Score:3, Insightful)
Congress & the prez are talking about bad incentives in the health care system. IMO this is one of the most obvious wrong incentives: the fact that there is no research into and marketing for cheap, widely available remedies, because you can't get a government-sponsored monopoly on them.
How is that a contradiction? (Score:4, Informative)
Radiation is generally bad for you, but we use it as a medical treatment.
Pick your favorite medical prescription, now eat 10 lbs of it. Oh look it's bad for you.
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Take water and eat 10lbs of it. You could get hospitalized or worse.
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Take water and eat 10lbs of it. You could get hospitalized or worse.
Or this could be the amount you need to drink in a day to be healthy, if you're physically active in hot weather.
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I'm convinced (Score:2)
Finally! I don't need to switch my A/C to recycle on the way to work.
Just suck in the fumes and feel health benefits baby!!
And in related news (Score:2)
Small quantities of DiHydrogen Monoxide are also beneficial to health.
CO good for you? (Score:2)
In the 60's it would keep the kids quiet. (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of you here are to young to remember the big boat station wagons that parents would pile full of stuff and kids and head off to places like Yellowstone and the like. Many of these had rear facing seats and power rear windows. The only problem was that if you let the window down a little, the car exhaust would be sucked into the car, especially near the rear facing seats where the kids were. Now many would think this is a problem, but parents of that day, after having to listen to the little brats giggling, and yelling would crack that rear window and let a little CO in to quiet the kids down. It worked, they went to sleep, and the only drawback was a few points off the ACT scores later in High School.
my parents did this... (Score:2)
apparent paradox (Score:2)
I failed tribalism 101, so I never get these apparent paradoxes, which seem to be rooted in the us/them, good/evil, they rape/we liberate cognitive homunculus.
Chlorine is also known as a deadly poison. That's how Ghandi liberated India: by extracting a deadly poison from the sea water and spreading it throughout the British subway system. And don't get me started on dihydrogen monoxide. Can kill someone with as little as one teaspoon, and it's found just about everywhere.
Hardly surprising, since we produce trace amounts (Score:3, Interesting)
Cuckoo for CO CO puffs? (Score:3, Funny)
So are many off-the-shelf medications (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't surprise me. Whilst many substances are unsafe at any dosage (e.g. mercury), some things are downright deadly in large quantities.
Like Paracetamol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol_toxicity [wikipedia.org] Apparently, it's one of the worst ways to die.
And warafin, an excellent anti-blood clotting agent is also used as rat poison.
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And warafin, an excellent anti-blood clotting agent is also used as rat poison.
That's how it works in the rat, too. The rat bangs into things, developing hundreds of internal bleedings during the course of it's day. The rat has evolved to deal with that. But when the rat's blood can no longer clot, that internal bleeding kills the rat.
Trivia: it's also what cocaine is cut with, because really good cocaine also causes nosebleeds.
Alfred Nobel anyone? (Score:2)
Nobel, after finding nitroglycerine, was proscribed it for his heart condition later in life. He said something along the lines of "Are you trying to blow my heart up??"
Glenn Beck (Score:2)
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this video seems off topic but he does make an insightful comment about Hydrogen Sulfide being used with cold to slow down metabolism.