This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the third part in our series on Gila Monsters,

and their close relatives, the Beated Lizards, the Lizards of the genus Heloderma.

If you haven't heard the other two parts of this series, I would recommend you go back and listen to those first.

We, in the first episode, talked about general Gila Monster biology. We talked a lot about their venom, the excruciating effects of the Gila Monster bite. In the second episode, we talked about

the Gila Monster as a kind of living fossil, a bit about its evolutionary history, and then also

human beliefs about Gila monsters that may or may not be rooted in fact. And then today we're back

to talk talk some more, especially about Gila Monsters and medicine. That's right. And before we get into

Gila Monster related medicine specifically,

I wanted to back up just a little bit and sort of set the stage. In fact, going back far enough,

they were just talking about the use of animals and medicine in general. So humans have long

turn to other organisms for medicine,

obviously, to the extent that you might not even think about it all that much. And it makes perfect

sense that we would have stumbled onto this pretty early on, because we consume other living

things in order to live. And these various organism-derived substances offer an array of effects,

short-term and long-term, beneficial, life-threatening, mind-expanding, religious experiences,

psychedelic experiences, whatever you want to call them. The things that we eat have all sorts

of effects. And we are what we eat. And that covers a lot

...