Chinese doctor says sorry for home anaesthetic experiment
- Medic knocks herself out to prove doubters wrong in debate over strength of drug
- Critics accuse her of lacking professionalism and rigour
A Chinese doctor with more than 2 million followers online has apologised for inhaling an anaesthetic to support her claim that the drug could make people faint instantly.
The doctor, who works in a major hospital in Wuxi in the eastern province of Jiangsu, said on Wednesday that the action was dangerous and she would not do it again.
“[I will] definitely not do it on myself or on other people,” she said.
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The doctor, who only identified herself by her surname Chen, posted footage online of herself inhaling fumes from a towel soaked with the anaesthetic sevoflurane, and quickly becoming dizzy.
She took the action after other bloggers disputed her assertions that a person could be knocked out immediately by the pharmaceutical, a prescription drug in China.
Those claims were in response to reports that a 23-year-old woman was killed in a hotel in Foshan, Guangdong province, last month after being drugged with the anaesthetic by her killer.
Local police said the woman died of sevoflurane poisoning.
On February 15, Chen urged police to investigate the drug’s distribution channel.
“There are really such medicines that will make you faint immediately after inhaling it. They are synthetic chemicals with high purity like ... sevoflurane,” she wrote.
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But a science blogger writing under the alias Jiang Ning Po Po disputed her claim, saying inhalation of sevoflurane could not make a person dizzy so quickly. He said her comments were “not professional, not rigorous and not responsible”.
Another blogger with the alias Ke Xue Wei Lai Ren agreed, urging Chen to “correct” her comments.
So to “let you know how rigorous I am” about science, Chen did the experiment on herself.
The action resulted in yet more criticism online.
“It’s better to find out how the suspect got the drug than arguing how long it takes to make a person faint,” wrote one user at social media website Bilibili.com.
Chen later removed the video and admitted it was a dangerous act.
She also said she turned herself in to the police.
News site The Paper reported that police told Chen to hand the sevoflurane over to a hospital for it to be disposed of as medical waste.
Chen said in her latest post that she bought the anaesthetic to sterilise her mother’s dog but did not use it because the animal died.
