drunkenknight9

I think it's hard for people to appreciate today how huge penicillin was. Safe to say it was one of the most influential discoveries of the century.

I work in EMS and obviously deal with overdoses and such all the time but only recently did someone point out to me that we should call poison control even for common overdoses and poisonings because of the funding being based on call volume. Do you find that you call them for things such as heroin overdoses for this reason or do you exclude things like that? We see more than enough opiate overdoses to know what to do to treat them but does the same idea apply?

I'm actually about to start med school in August and I'm strongly considering a future in emergency medicine so I'm curious about these things!

Narcan is the brand name of naloxone. It's a drug that has a high affinity for the same receptors that opiates, such as heroin, bind to. By binding to these receptors it blocks the action of heroin. In a heroin overdose, respiratory depression (decreased rate of breathing) eventually leads to a person's breathing completely stopping but when narcan is administered these effects are negated. Narcan does carry with it some dangers such as inducing seizures or resulting in people violently waking from an overdose and causing harm to others around them. For a non-medical person and first responders it is to be administered by spraying it in the nose through what is called a mucosal atomizing device and then it is absorbed by the highly vascular membranes in the nose. This is a slow enough route of administration that the negative effects are uncommon and the likelihood of having the desired effect are very high. This is the difference between life and death for many overdoses.

As someone who works in healthcare, we administered it by either that route or via an IV or intramuscular injection. IV administration must be carefully titrated to have the desired effect of increasing respiratory drive without inducing seizures or waking the person to an agitated and often violent state.

Anyone who is being given narcan should always seek further medical assistance as the effects can fade before the opiate that caused the problem has been cleared from the body through natural processes.

Narcan is now often being provided to the general public, especially to those who are users or have family or friends who use heroin because when someone stops breathing there is little time to do something about it. If someone doesn't have access to narcan and witnesses an overdose the only other thing that can be done is to call for help and provide rescue breaths to the person as you would when doing CPR but without doing compressions (unless they also have no pulse in which case CPR is necessary). Narcan is extremely effective and relatively safe with the benefits far outweighing the consequences in nearly every case.

As someone who is a healthcare professional I have to stress that there are almost certainly more people out there who gave not been caught but the odds of you being cared for by one are extremely low. The best thing you can do to protect yourself is what you should do anyway: educated yourself about your health and ask questions, write things down, and have a responsible and knowledgeable friend or family member who can be there to fill that role if you're incapacitated.

And now we give antibiotics for every little thing and create highly resilient bacteria.