Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Now, we're going to move to a fashionable detox treatment known as Cambo, which has resulted in the death of a man in the UK. This involves using a drug made from the poisonous skin of an Amazonian tree frog. This treatment is being offered in Ireland and in the UK. It is explicitly banned, though, in countries including Australia.
Dr. Craig Slattery joins me now, Assistant Professor of Regulatory Affairs and Toxicology at UCD. Craig, you're very welcome to the programme. Good morning.
Chapter 2: What is Kambo and why is it controversial?
Morning, Clare. How are you? I'm good. Listening to this treatment, it is extraordinary how it works. So the skin is burnt and then this frog poison is applied. Is that how it works? Yeah. No, I have to say, I've done a first-hand experience. So what seems to be the procedure as it's framed is, as you say, the skin is damaged. So the way that that's done is
typically a kind of an incense stick, a burning incense stick is used to make little small burns on the skin to damage the skin basically in pharmaceuticals we talk about a transdermal delivery. So it's basically to remove the protection of the skin so that when this And as they say, it's a frog poison, a tree frog poison from Amazonian South America.
And they basically have little pellets which have been dried out and they're applied directly on the damaged skin. So the idea is, and the claims here are that there are bioactive peptides, which are basically little chunks of protein, which... Once you apply them to the burnt area, they can get into the bloodstream and get around the body and do various things.
And they begin this process of, this is why people think it's cleansing and detoxing, because you'll almost immediately have gastric issues, won't you, like vomiting and diarrhoea? Yeah, and... For anyone who's interested, there are lots of videos online of people going through this, and it's quite horrific.
I mean, as you say, and quite often with these sort of cleansing, purging claims, they will tell you to expect violent vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, and they will, again, frame that this is part of the process. It's the body getting rid of bad things, which... the first thing to say is that's utter rubbish.
Anywhere where it's being framed that vomiting and diarrhea is normal and part of the therapeutic process is way off base. So as a result, of course, you become dehydrated almost immediately and then all of the associated problems you're at high risk of then, like damage to your kidneys and your liver and so on. Exactly, yeah.
Again, we'd call it hypovolemic shock, so you're basically losing fluid from the system really dramatically. It happens within minutes of applying this poison. A clinician looking at a patient would probably describe it as an anaphylactic shock, a hypovolemic shock. That's what the body's going through because you're losing fluids.
You're not just losing fluids, you're also losing all the really important ions that are in the system like salt, like potassium, and Our system has evolved, the human body has evolved to have quite a tight rein on these really important molecules and on the amount of water that's in the system.
And particularly at the moment with the warm weather, everybody's being, you know, it's being stressed how important it is to stay hydrated.
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Chapter 3: How is Kambo administered during the detox process?
So when you rapidly force the body to dehydrate, you know, you're basically putting the cardiovascular system under massive pressure. The heart is going to speed up. So tachycardia, your heart rate will go through the roof to try and basically keep the circulation going. Your blood pressure will drop dramatically because there's now less fluid in the system to keep the pressure up.
And as you said, the kidneys are at risk of long-term damage. But Acutely, you can cause cardiac arrhythmias and potentially heart attacks, and unfortunately,
people around the world have have died as a direct result of the treatment well you'd wonder why anybody would want to do this but it is being promoted as you said as a detox because people are having these physical symptoms and then they're having understandably hallucinations as a result so people are saying well this is why we should do it because it's connecting with your chakras it's cleansing body and mind you say that's all claptrap yeah i mean it's
I suppose it's, and I'm not drawing an equivalence, but you could liken it to people undertaking physically challenging sports, even an extreme sport, and a lot of people will challenge the body by going through, effectively,
mid-level trauma you know you go out and you run a marathon that's putting that system under stress and when you go through something like that there's kind of a you know a lot of neurotransmitters are released endorphins and the system and people will talk about the buzz that they get from kind of challenging themselves and going through that so there's
I suppose the psychological journey of going through this traumatic event and coming out the far side, there is a natural kind of high associated with that. But also, as you say, there has been some analysis done on this poison from the secretion from the tree frogs. There are agents in there.
There are molecules that look a lot like opioids, so things that interact with the opioid receptors in the brain. they do cause or could cause altered mental state. Those effects are going to be very real, but the problem is that the physiological stress you're putting the body under, that is very problematic and it's very risky.
I read about a similar sort of a detox called ayahuasca, which people might be familiar with. I know when I was reading Will Smith's autobiography, he had done it about nine times. Is that equally as risky? I suppose where I would come from, and I think a lot of my colleagues would come from, would be a place of anything that is going to put the body under stress like that. You are...
potentially going to have these psychological rebound afterwards where you will feel better about yourself or you'll feel like you put yourself through something. So whether it is, you know, a Cambo or some other cleanse, I take a very sceptical view for any of those, particularly if they haven't been tested in a controlled clinical environment, you know, and it hasn't been compared against
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