What is the relationship between poisoning and accidental first aid?

Poisoning is one of the most common types of unexpected emergencies and is the core coverage scenario of accidental first aid. The two are linked to include and be included, general rules and special adaptation.

I have been working in pre-hospital first aid for almost 8 years, and this connection is particularly obvious. At least 15% of the accidents we deal with on a daily basis are poisonings of various types, ranging from a child accidentally swallowing an elder's antihypertensive medicine, to vomiting and diarrhea after eating spoiled food stalls in the summer, to chemical leakage at a construction site, and residents being poisoned by accidentally picking wild mushrooms. They all fall under the category of accidental first aid. We just received a call last week. A family of four in the suburbs ate porcini mushrooms they had picked. Within half an hour after the meal, they began to have hallucinations. They said they saw little people running around the house. The neighbors helped call 120. When we arrived at the scene, we followed the general emergency first aid procedures and checked for vital signs and checked for other comorbidities. Then we induced vomiting and added normal saline. By the time we were sent to the hospital, the symptoms had mostly subsided, and a follow-up later said there were no sequelae.

However, the relationship between the two is not entirely without controversy in the industry. After all, the specialty of poisoning first aid is indeed too strong. Think about it, for ordinary traumatic accidents, the first aid logic is to stop bleeding, immobilize, and avoid secondary injuries. For cardiovascular and cerebrovascular accidents, the priority is to ensure breathing and get to the hospital as soon as possible. But poisoning is different. Many poisons have exclusive antidotes and special disposal procedures. For example, when encountering organic matter For patients poisoned by phosphorus pesticides, the patient must immediately take off the pesticide-stained clothes and wipe the skin clean to avoid continued absorption. The patient must also immediately intramuscularly inject pralidoxime chloride and administer atropine. Ordinary first aid personnel who have not received special poisoning first aid training may not respond in time to these operations. Therefore, there have been voices saying that poisoning first aid should be a separate system, with special arrangements from pre-hospital to emergency department, and should not be mixed with ordinary accident first aid, which can greatly improve the efficiency of treatment.

But the opposition is also very real: the vast majority of poisoning incidents are accidental. How can ordinary people distinguish between "poisoning first aid" and "ordinary accidental first aid"? When something happens, the first reaction is to call 120 and go through the accident help channel. If the system is really separated, it will confuse people. If someone mistakenly thinks that poisoning is not an accident and does not know who to ask for help, it will really delay the matter.

To put it bluntly, if accidental first aid is compared to a protective net that covers all sudden personal risks, poisoning first aid is the piece of this net that is most densely woven and requires the highest material strength - it is originally part of the net, but because the things to be covered are more special, it needs to be reinforced separately during weaving. For us ordinary people, there is no need to worry about classification. If you encounter an emergency suspected of poisoning, you can just call 120 to report an emergency first aid. The dispatcher will first teach you on the phone simple pre-operations such as inducing vomiting and staying away from the source of the poison. It is much more useful than searching for classification online for half a day.