Look to nearby colleges or universities with an agricultural arm. Example, https://snr.unl.edu/academicprograms/prescribed/index.aspx
Why not controlled flooding? Controlled fires are consuming a backlog of available fuel to mitigate the chances of a future uncontrolled fire. A flood wouldn't be relieving any sort of equivalent pressures, they're not analogous.
In the context of controlled burns, there's nothing to gain from flooding land temporarily in a similar fashion. However, rebuilding wetlands is actually a great way to prevent floods in other areas.
Well said.
There's a researcher who in the 80's tried to tell the forest service all this, and they simply wouldn't listen.
There's even a news clip of him from the time.
I'll see if I can find it.
There's nothing to be gained by flooding land, it will not prevent future floods or reduce the size or veracity of them.
This is not entirely true, though the purpose is not the same as controlled burns. We intentionally (re)flood wetlands we've previously dried in order to restore wetland habitats.
Kind of like the fires, though, we learned the hard way that draining all the wetlands is bad, and they're actually very important features of nature.
Roofuskit hid the main answer to your question (within a great commentary on US wildfire): Fires require 3 things, oxygen, fuel, and heat.
Remove the fuel source in front of a fire, and you prevent its spread.
In the western US, this is done to create a fire break - a line which a wildfire can't cross because there's no fuel.
And the rest of what roofus said is very important: US policy around fires for the last 80 years or so has been to suppress ANY fire. This has had the opposite effect of enabling more undergrowth to form, meaning more fuel.
Additionally, California in particular essentially stopped all logging. Logging companies maintained what we commonly call fire roads - those roads were often an unintentional fire break. Those roads overgrew with the kind of growth (low scrub) that is ideal wildfire growth fuel.
Wildire in the western US is a lesson in assuming we understand how natural systems work, and have the ability to control them.
Edit: firefighters in a city/town remove oxygen when using fire suppressant materials. Water is used to remove heat when the fire turns it to steam.
CO2 is largely what's in most consumer fire bottles - it provides an oxygen-free "cloud" to break the cycle of a fire by replacing the available oxygen.
Fires burning brush and forests are natural occurrences. There are even certain trees whose seeds only germinate after a fire. At some point we got it in our heads that all forest fires are bad and we should extinguish every one with extreme prejudice. (I'm looking at you Smokey the Bear.)
After some decades we learned the hard way that this tactic is wildly flawed. Fires require 3 things, oxygen, fuel, and heat. When you never allow ANY fire to burn even in a controlled manner you allow that fuel to build up, and build up, and build up.
What we learned by putting out every single fire is that you are exchanging frequent small fires for infrequent massive, completely uncontrolled, and devastating fires.
There's nothing to be gained by flooding land, it will not prevent future floods or reduce the size or strength of them.
We don’t have the water resources to fight fires with controlled flooding, or energy resources - flooding would come with its own ecological problems, affecting everything from plant life to animal to microbial, it would be an environmental disaster even if we had the resources and technology. Controlled burning is also good for nature, nature evolved for occasional burns, it feeds microbial life, it reboots life, it is necessary for many plants to even reseed. It’s cheap. It’s safe when done properly. It’s efficient compared to water. There are many more reasons, but these are the major ones.
Pain is good for the vast majority. The issue is when things are broken/not normal functioning. So, those are the things that should be addressed rather than using opioid and similar drugs to treat the symptoms of those conditions, IMHO. But there are ways to desensitize, unfortunately, those usually aren't 100% permanent though they do train your brain to be able to withstand it a little better.
Anecdotally, as someone with chronic pain as well as someone who has had to ensure severe pain such as running on progressively severely stress fractures legs, knees, and feet for weeks as well as experiencing migraines that sometimes cluster, issues from nerve damage, etc., while I do have the ability to mask a lot of pain, I actually feel it quite intensely still. But take that with a grain if salt as I am neurodivergent and have a hard time ignoring things or forming habits of any kind based on exposure or repetition like most people. And the damaged nerves that I have may not be able to feel touch or pain very well, but actually acute the pain is often more intense even if chronic pain is numbed.
So it's fairly complex, and, assuming you don't have a medical condition that prevents pain receptors from working properly, the nervous system, including the brain, adapt to ensure that you're able to feel pain when needed to prevent injury. So there's unlikely to ever be a way to "switch on/off" or "dial down" pain that will continue to work long term without your body adapting to it. But damn I wish there were. 🙂
What might be possible in the very far future, outside of drugs that are typically fairly indirect intervention, would be an electronic nervous system interface that could monitor and intercept and adjust signals so that your body doesn't "realize" there's anything "wrong" and doesn't try to adapt or repair it. But that would be pretty complex tech and extremely risky surgery for even cutting edge technology right now.
I agree fully with wat your saying here.
Strains also are limited in their range cannabinoids and smoking of any kind is always bad.
The potential i am seeing in cannabinoids rather then “medicinal marijuana” is that we can isolate and produce new drugs with exactly the amount and combinations needed.
So exactly like the tinctured and pills you mention that are lacking now.
Rather then trial and error we might be able to one day meassure and profile the natural endocannabinoids in individual people, then build a pill that gives them exactly what they need.
Its probabmy more sci-fi then science at this point but it seems reachable. There are some studies that have shown that certain disorders (adhd, some flavors of autism) do produce less natural endocannabonoids on their own. Currently those people often do end up smoking to self medicate. Some proper science on the topic could really help them.
To add on my previous mentioned little fact about breastmilk cause it is analog to this. There is a suggestion that there is a chemical reaction going n during breastfeeding with milk that flows backwards and tells the mother body how to finetune the milk for the babys current needs.
Ya, even more reason for me to love my metabolism. Metabolizes THC and whatnot faster than anyone and then can't metabolizes shit when it comes to calories and food 😂
Hmm. I just looked it up and some people metabolize edibles too fast (it gets to the liver) and don’t ever feel it. Fascinating.
I got some light headedness for a few minutes on a 50mg edible but that was the "highest" I've ever been.
I want to do some testing on you.
Like observing you after a 100mg edible.
Legalizing it federally would allow for a lot more research and stringent methods of prescribing it. Medical marijuana as it is isn’t functionally different from recreational.
Dunno about the science, but for me the sensations caused by different strains lead to different behaviors.
"Body high": Muscles feel loose and relaxed, maybe a floaty sensation. I could get up and do something productive, but it's just so cozy right here. Then I veg out and eat.
"Head high": My mind is drawing a lot of connections between things, not quite racing thoughts, but a lot of analysis and half-finished ideas. I see a dirty plate and think "Better take this to the kitchen" then on the way there I see some dirt on the floor so I set the plate down and grab a broom. Then I realize how inconvenient it is that the broom closet is so far from the kitchen, and now suddenly I am reorganizing the house.
Doesn't even do anything for me. I've tried it on numerous occasions and not once gotten "high". I can't even tell you what high is other than from observing others. Eventually stopped cause I was just wasting my money.
This kind of touches on something that has always rubbed me the wrong way about medical marijuana
And don't get me wrong, if it helps you, or if you just enjoy it I'm all for your right to use it however you want
But you've got a headache or heart condition or whatever, your doctor wouldn't just say "yeah, you should go find some willow trees and chew on the bark of a couple different ones until you find one that works for you"
No, they'd tell you to go take X milligrams of aspirin, Y times a day, with or without food.
Because we know what chemicals in the willow bark are actually helping with your problem, we've isolated it (and improved upon it) and worked out specific dosage guidelines based on things like age and weight to treat certain issues.
But with medical marijuana, it's more of a "go ahead and figure out what works for you" situation. There's a lot of different strains of different potencies with different amounts of different active ingredients.
And sure, your doctor might be able to make some recommendations that you want a strain that's high in one cannabinoid but low in another to deal with your issue, and the people at the dispensary can help you through that as well.
But really, if we're going to treat it like the medicine it is, we should probably be dosing measured amounts of specific cannabinoids in purified forms in pills, tinctures, inhalers, vapes, etc.
And you probably shouldn't be smoking it. You can quibble over whether or not marijuana smoke is worse, less bad, or about the same as tobacco smoke health-wise, but I think we can all agree that inhaling smoke of any kind is probably bad for your lungs and you're better off not doing it. If nicotine could be used to treat some disease, I'm pretty sure your doctor wouldn't say to go smoke X cigarettes a day, they'd tell you to get some gum or a patch, or at least vape instead.
And with the state of marijuana laws, healthcare, and general affordability, it can be hard to even do the research needed to make that happen, let alone set up the kinds of infrastructure needed to make those more personalized cannabinoid medications, and of course all of the ways pharmaceutical companies would overcharge us for those meds, so again, I'm glad that what we have now is at least available to those who need it
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking at how to do it better and treat these chemicals more like other medications are.
Others are answering about some of the science.
I want to point out that marijuana was a schedule I controlled substance in the United States for many decades, with no accepted medical use. During that time, it was exceedingly difficult to do research with cannabis, and licenses were very strictly controlled by the DEA. As a result, a lot of the research we want to have has simply not been there.
The situation is starting to turn around now, but it takes a long time to turn the ship around.
There are over a hunderd different types of cannabinoids.
They all have different effects on the unique brain chemisty of an individual but also influence the effects of eachother. (Entourage effect)
There are an uncountable amount of combinations here with an uncountable amount of specific effects.
It has to be said that all drugs carry real risks and cannabis is not harmless.
But with the info above i have always believed in its potential to one day synthesize fully personalized medicine. Other then many other drugs endocannabinoids are also created naturally in the mamal brain and are very important for mood regulation and cognitive function.
An interesting fact is while people would shudder by the idea of giving these substances to infants, breastmilk is actually a huge source of natural cannabinoids.
Everybody's brain is a little bit different and reactive differently to "substances". Cocaine, for instance, does nothing to me that I can describe as high though it will numb my gums if I rub on them.
There's also lots of different cultivars of weed, with varying amounts of certain compounds(cannabinoids), causing different expected effects. So, one kind might put me in the mood to tear an engine down while the one in the other bag makes me want to play rogue-likes on my phone, on the couch, with a bag of Doritos.
One thing I don’t see in other comments: if you’re vaccinated, the immune response will be still slow.
Immunity typically means a “memory trace” of a past immune response in form of a low number of cells that conserve the specific combinations of genetic material to produce an effective antibody. While persons with immunity may have detectable circulating antibody levels, those levels may be too low for an effective response. First, those memory cells need to divide and recruit more immune cells. That’s typically fast enough for fending off a new infection, because the infectious agent also works on the time scale of biological replication or reproduction.
As venoms can kill cells relatively fast, the ramping up of a response from immunity can be too slow, compared to the administration of a big dose of antibodies that can rapidly neutralize the toxin.
Generally the immune system doesn't work that way. The immune system generally targets living organisms actively attacking the body. Immunity derives from learning how to efficiently kill the organisms, often after a single encounter, and "remembering" that for as long as possible.
The defense against toxins is a little different. I don't have as much knowledge on that side, but generally the defense against these kinds of things is achieved when a cell is damaged, but not killed by the agent heals in such a way that it's less susceptible to that agent. Kind of like a callus forming on a part of the skin that gets repeatedly damaged. Also, the systems of the body that are responsible for clearing out toxins become somewhat more effective at getting rid of them after repeated exposure.
So, vaccination generally relies on training the more active defense by specialized cells that are specifically "designed" to be trained and "remember" how to attack the organism, but not as much a reaction by the cells that are being attacked by the microorganism. Whereas toxin defense is more a reaction by the affected cells themselves as well as increased efficiency of the body to filter it out, but the affected cells don't really "learn" how to protect themselves in quite the same way.
But this is all generalization. There are many types of venoms and some can be affected by the immune system, but in general it's a very different type of response that requires repeated exposure and recovery to develop.
Tim Friede intentionally exposed himself to snake venom. Antibodies in his blood could counter 13 different elapid venoms. So it's happened at least once.
Depends on the venom.
Some shit just kills tissue, you can't build tolerance to that.
Others make your heart pop like you just used on cocaine, and those you may be able to build tolerance to.
Even if you just narrow down to snakes, there's still a lot of different kinds of venom