the rod shaped Clostridium Botulism bacterium produces Botulin, a very potent neurotoxin (BOTOX) it is literally the most toxic known protein (or one of) and at minute doses kills humans, minute doses. The trick is using enough botulism to effect your PNS/CNS but not enough to kill you.
Now a safe dose for any individual must be based on considerations like sex, size, age, metabolism, illness, coexisting disease or illness even potential immune function and personal genetics. At LD50 of 0.005 it seems that determining a safe dose, a nonrisky dose which effects the nervous system enough to TREAT but not enough to interfere with body function would be a science, akin to dancing on the head of a pin, theres a tiny level of tolerable variance.
My question is then, why do people assume its safe or prefferable to surgery? No doctor (outside of months of testing you with a battery of equipment) could ever garentee a nonrisky dose, even then the whole procedure is questionable.
I’m not saying it doesn’t work and hasn’t even had a lot of evidence to support why/how it works, its THE how/why it can work that freaks me out. Both my doctor and dentist hinted at it back when they thought I had bad muscle spasms and spinal problem (my joints not muscles bother me), so doctors are quick to suggest it too, I know of a few people who do get it done.
So it seems strange to be suggesting this radical treatment at the drop of a hat or as anything but a last resort.
Maybe Xunian or someone else can highlight the biology of how they come to safe dosing procedures if i’m horribly wrong about this.
Things like muscle weakness, breathing problems, spreading paralysis or even death seem innate risks to the procedure.
The second article below mentions 16 deaths via botox. Enough to keep me off it if it was an anti-aging treatment, but I would still consider, possibly, if it relieved tremendous pain, I suppose. I mean I would guess a decent number of people die each year of anti-inflammatory steroids and even some over the counter medications for pain.
Like anything else, it is about where the toxin is administered as well as how it is administered. As an IV injection, it will kill the crap out of you. Eating it will also mess you up pretty darned good. But when it is injected directly into muscles, it really can’t move that far before getting all bound up. Also, the dose given in these sorts of situations is really, really, really small. Sure, it is active at low doses but serial dilutions allow for even lower doses to be achieved.
In terms of how they figured out a safe dosage, there was a little more precaution taken than with other drugs (especially nowadays). Testing started in mice/rats (a lot of it was done in the '50s, so I’m not sure which model was used), then moved to monkeys (this step is not normally done anymore), and then to people. How risky is it? Not very, actually. Many thousands of people have had it done, even had it administered by non-professionals and only some 28 people have died from it. My understanding is that even in those cases it was due to an ‘allergic’ reaction gone awry (the idea that our body might occasionally over-react to a toxin that is as nasty as botox doesn’t really surprise me . . .).
I’d say go for it. It has been used to treat overactive muscles for far longer than it has been used cosmetically.