Run a search just about anywhere for the brown recluse or other recluse spiders, and you’ll find horrifically gruesome photographs and nightmarish anecdotes of their supposedly horrendous, even life-threatening bites.
Even some doctors are convinced that these spiders can cause severe skin lesions.
Doctors, however, are not interchangeable with trained arachnologists. Take a good look at this bite on someone’s hand:
This is what an “extreme” recluse bite looks like. Absolutely nobody has ever been killed by a recluse bite that we know of, and the vast majority aren’t even this serious, marked only by mild pain in the affected area. What even medical professionals sometimes mistake for severe spider bites are in fact bacterial infections - and any wound, a bug bite or a papercut, can lead to such infections in an unsanitary environment without proper attention to hygiene.
Not only are recluse bites generally minor, they’re also unlikely to happen in the first place. Recluses, like nearly all spiders, bite only as a last resort when completely cornered - bites generally occur when a spider is accidentally caught in someone’s clothing or bedsheets, for example - and even then, they often deliver a “dry” bite without injecting venom.
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2002/08/05/hlsa0805.htm
“Doctors are horrible [about] misdiagnosing any kind of necrotic-looking wounds as brown recluse bites,” says Sean P. Bush, MD, a professor of emergency medicine at Loma Linda School of Medicine.”
http://spiders.ucr.edu/myth.html
“Almost all brown recluse spider bites heal nicely in two to three months without medical treatment at all. Also the long-term medical outcome is excellent without treatment.”
“We estimate that we have seen or reviewed about 1,000 credible recluse spider bites, and we have seen about a dozen cases of impressive, sustained hemolysis.”http://www.light-science.com/spiderskin.html
A family four lived with thousands of recluses and was never bitten. Once.
Added emphasis to a bit there.
PLEASE read this, especially if you live in the Midwest/South where these spiders reside. The cause of a necrotic wound is usually infection or a completely unrelated condition that the patient was unaware of and the doctor did not recognize. It is estimated that around %80 of spider bites are misdiagnosed.
I’d also like to add to this, as Hobo spiders are we we got up here and our often compared to brown recluse, but they aren’t as dangerous as people make them out to be, either. In fact, the evidence supporting that they are a danger to humans is quite flimsy, and the toxicity of its bite is widely disputed.
If you are a relatively healthy person with decent hygiene and access to the most basic of medical supplies, you should not be too worried about a brown recluse or hobo spider bite.
Above all, I just want people to get it through their thick skulls that, even if you fear spiders and worry about getting bitten, they are not out to get you. They don’t want to hurt you. If anything, they want to hide away from the scary giant noise-monster who could easily crush it in one blow.
