Medicine: Shock Cure?

How can jolting a patient repeatedly with 20,000 volts of low-current electricity block the effects of a venomous snakebite? Dr. Ronald Guderian has no answer; he knows only that the treatment seems to work. "After we help people, we can ask questions," says Guderian, an American missionary physician working in the Amazon rain forests of Ecuador. Snakebites account for 4% of deaths in the region, and survivors sometimes suffer tissue damage that can lead to gangrene and amputation of the affected limb. But as reported in the July 26 issue of the Lancet, a British medical journal, Guderian has successfully treated 34 Ecuadorian Indians with electric shocks over the past six years, without apparent side effects or lingering pain from bites.

The missionary medicine man has been using a crude version of the police stun gun, a weapon more commonly employed to subdue emotionally disturbed suspects. He says that lives have also been saved by tapping power from the outboard motor of a canoe. Though snakebite experts say Guderian's treatment defies explanation, as word of his shocking cure has spread, pilots, missionaries and mining-company employees have begun carrying stun guns into the jungle.