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Gold pellets inserted into Lion

drfrank

Critical Thinker
drfrank
Joined
Nov 24, 2005
Messages
445
I couldn't find a thread about this already, so I thought I'd start one :)

A lion in Rome's Bioparco zoo has had 50 gold pellets inserted into its body in order to help its arthritis. What set alarm bells ringing was that it's been described as an `alternative' therapy based on acupuncture.

Sorry, too new to post HTML links at the moment, but it should be pretty easy to find on most news sites

Is there actually any evidence backing up this treatment, or is it pure bunkum? It sounds to me a bit like the homeopathic tests on animals, in that the measure of improvement is purely a subjective judgement of the owner.

"I think he lost his pain now. Obviously, I can't ask him but I can observe him and it looks like the pain is absolutely reduced. It's a great result," Friedrich said.
 
Here you go.

I see they're augmenting the gold treatment with better heating in the cage. Why go to all the expense of the extra heating before they give the gold a chance to "work"?
 
drfrank said:
What set alarm bells ringing was that it's been described as an `alternative' therapy based on acupuncture.
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I don't know anything about that, but gold (actually, gold compounds) is an accepted and mainstream treatment for rheumatoid arthritis in humans. It's a lot less common than it used to be as new treatments have been developed, but the neat thing about gold is it is a very simple antiimflammatory so you don't have to test it on a control group of 30 lions before learning whether it will harm them.
 
Yeah, but that's injecting gold salts, isn't it? They've apparently inserted 24 carat gold pellets into the lion. Is that likely to do any good?
 
Dunno the answer to that. Perhaps lions tolerate the side effects of the salts less well? It's the gold part of the salts which are the part that works for people.

I don't know whether this is a good idea. I'm just saying that it's not as wooish as it come off on first read.
 
Saw this on television this morning. They started it with an acupuncture reference. Couldn't tell if it was really acupuncture or they were misusing the term because the pellets were inserted via hollow needles/tubes.

My initial reaction was that this is bunkum, but now not sure.

Maybe Rolfe has a thought?
 
Pure gold will stay pure gold, I don't think that it is going to react with anything in a Lion.
 
Aha, I found a passable reference to gold bead implantation, which can be found in the link below kindly posted by richardm. It contains the following:

Gold bead implants became popular in the 1980s in veterinary acupuncture as a form of “permanent acupuncture.” This technique involves implanting fragments of gold jeweler’s wire, gold-plated pellets, or magnets. The most common applications include arthritis, degenerative myelopathy, wobbler’s syndrome, and epilepsy. While some advocates claim up to 98% success with gold bead implantation in conditions such as hip dysplasia, two double-blind, controlled studies evaluating the effectiveness of gold bead implants found no benefit over placebo. Risks of gold bead implantation include migration of the metal fragments into the nervous system, infection (especially if nonsterile beads are used), and cellulitis.

Unfortunately, it doesn't give any proper references, but since the page seems to be generally pro-acupuncture it may well be accurate.
 
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Gold is sorta non-reactive. Every now and then they unearth something from a coffin where the object was in direct contact with a mouldering corpse and when it is cleaned of the disgusting bits, it is good as new. Since positioning something in the squishy bits of a body is rather difficult, it must be the simple presence of the gold. And it must be "in" rather than "out" otherwise jewelers would be woo doctors and we can't have a diversion of revenues.

Sounds like some sort of odd magic to me. If I were less lazy I'd check out The Golden Bough.
 
This is perfect. Not only does it cure the arthritis, but if they ever get loose, dowsers can find them easy.
 
See what an acupuncturist thinks about the reproducibility of this.
Most veterinary acupuncturists, who use AP or gold implants at the acupoints, find them to be most successful and effective to treat canine hip dysplasia (HD). Clinical experience from several colleagues, with overall success rates of 80-90%, supports this opinion. Recently, although they used slightly different methods of implantation, three independent uncontrolled retrospective clinical studies on the effectiveness of gold implants to treat canine HD in 218 dogs in Denmark (the late Jens Klitsgaard, 100 dogs), Norway (Are Thoresen, 50 dogs) and Germany (Erhard Schulze, 68 dogs) reported a clinical success rate of near 90%. However, the clinical response to gold bead implantation AP to treat canine HD was evaluated also in two double-blind studies. One was in Finland by Anna Hielm et al. (1998) and the other was in the USA by Bebchuk et al. (1998). Also there will shortly be publishes a third article by Gry Jäger (Oslo 2002). Anna Hielm gave me a summary of her article in Finnish. The dogs were treated in a double-blinded study; the owners did the evaluation. Both groups of dogs showed positive results but there was no difference between the two groups. Bebchuk's study was a communication from his university. He also treated the dogs in a double-blind study but the evaluation was objective; it used force-plates to measure the force exerted by the dogs on the treated limbs. Neither group of dogs improved, and there was no difference between the two groups. The dogs in the treatment group tended to get worse. Gry Jäger's article will conclude (as reported at the IVAS Congress in Spietz) that there was a positive and statistical difference between the two groups, but much less that one may expect according to the results reported by Klitsgaard, Schulze and Thoresen. All three studies show the same result: gold-implantation in the hip area had little or no positive effect on the dogs and some dogs in Bebchuck's study even got worse! So we see that a very successful therapy in the clinic is almost without effect in a double-blind trial.
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Rolfe.
 
Do older animals suffer from erectile disfunction? Sounds longer lasting than Variga or Sialics (acording to my spams). Why else would they implant gold pellets into their loins?...what?.....Oh , nevermind.
 
LMAO! You don't even wanna know what I thought of when I first read this thread. :D I also thought "Man, that is one brave veterinarian!" :D
 
Oh hello, Mr Lion! How are you? No no - keep on doing what you were doing. Don't mind me...I'm just...looking at the trees and whistling...that's all...tra lala...

Oh good, his back is turned... OK, just sneak up behind and a quick HUP! and...

minced_beef2.jpg
 
Freakshow said:
LMAO! You don't even wanna know what I thought of when I first read this thread. :D I also thought "Man, that is one brave veterinarian!" :D
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Yes, I can see now that perhaps I didn't think the title through as well as I could have lol

It obviously got your attention, though ;)
 
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