What are the differences between poisoning and accident first aid?

In fact, the core difference between the two is that the underlying logic of treatment is completely different - first aid for ordinary accidental injuries prioritizes stopping losses and preventing secondary injuries, while first aid for poisoning prioritizes cutting off the source of poison and reducing poison absorption. Even the priority of on-site traceability is very different.

Take the two police trips I took last week on the 120 shift. In the first trip, an electric car was knocked over by a car at an intersection. The rider fell out and slid two meters. When I arrived at the scene, my first reaction was to tell him to stop moving, check his consciousness and touch his carotid artery, then hold down his bleeding elbow, fix his cervical spine with a cervical collar, and confirm that there was no spinal injury before I dared to lift him up on a stretcher. I didn’t dare to move him casually during the whole process, for fear that the fractured end would poke the blood vessels and nerves, which would cause more serious secondary injuries.

The last trip was to a farmer in the suburbs who ate the gray-patterned amanita he picked. When I arrived at his house, I saw that the man was still sitting and chatting, but he was a little nauseous and dizzy. My first action was to take out a tongue depressor and induce vomiting. I didn't even measure his blood pressure. I asked him to vomit all the mushroom residue left in his stomach first. I was afraid that the toxins would be absorbed into the intestines two minutes later, which would affect any subsequent treatment.

Of course, not all situations are so clear-cut. In the past two months, our department has specially discussed the priority of "compound injuries and poisoning". For example, someone drank half a kilogram of pesticide and then drove into a tree. When he arrived at the scene, he suffered head injuries and bleeding, and there was also the risk of pesticide poisoning. The urgency of the older generation Rescuers are used to treating injuries first, stopping heavy bleeding and then dealing with poisoning. Younger doctors are more likely to assess the risk of fatality first. If the injury is only a broken skin but no vital damage, inserting a gastric tube and lavage the stomach first is the key to saving life. There is no absolute unified standard now, and they all adjust flexibly based on the situation on site.

To put it bluntly, the difference between the two is like cleaning up a table that has spilled ink. If the legs of the table are broken first (corresponding to accidental injuries), you have to stabilize the table first to prevent it from collapsing and damaging other things, and then wipe the ink.； If the table is not broken but only ink has been spilled (corresponding to poisoning), you have to hold the paper to absorb the ink that has not penetrated into the wood grain. Otherwise, when the ink soaks in, no matter how you wipe it, it will leave marks.

The diagnosis and treatment path after being sent to the hospital is also much different. For patients with ordinary accidents, after CT and MRI are taken, and the injured part is found and treated, as long as there is no infection or complications, the recovery will basically be visible to the naked eye and get better day by day. Poisoned patients are different. Many poisons have a "false recovery period." I once met a young man who ate wild mushrooms. When he came here, he was induced to vomit and had his stomach washed. He was jumping up and down and wanted to be discharged from the hospital the same day. We stopped him. As a result, signs of liver damage appeared in the early morning of the next day. Even follow-up visits for poisoned patients are much more frequent than ordinary accidents, for fear of sudden attacks by latent toxins.

If ordinary people are really in a situation where they are unsure, don't blindly try online strategies. When calling 120, explain clearly the cause and effect, whether it was a fall, a touch, or something you ate or drank that made you feel unwell. The operator will first give you the most reliable on-site guidance, which is much more reliable than making random guesses on your own.