If the above photo makes you cringe, you’re not alone. The fear of these beasts, called arachnophobia, is surprisingly common. Somewhere between 15 and 55 percent of people get anxious around spiders or even pictures of spiders. Even many who can stomach the sight of these eight-legged animals would be hesitant to perform the a brazen act of actually holding one—after all, everyone knows spider bites fester into giant, gaping sores which leave hideous scars.
At least, that’s what we grow up believing. In reality, though, there are some 40,000 species of spiders, only a dozen or so are actually dangerous to humans. And of those, only the venom of recluse spiders can cause the kind of tissue death (called necrosis) that we so often attribute to spider bites. Recent studies have shown that, instead, people assume the worst of innocent spiders when much more sinister species, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are to blame for their wounds.
We would hope that doctors would be more discerning—that they would be able to properly identify spider bites when they (very rarely) occur. But a new paper suggests that our trusted physicians may not be better than the rest of us. A review of clinical literature found that a whopping 78% of “spider bite” cases may be misattributed. Continue reading “Arachnophobia in the Medical Literature: Are Published “Spider Bites” Reliable?”
