What is the difference between poisoning and accidental first aid?

The core difference between the two is that the priority of first aid is completely different. First aid for poisoning must first focus on "blocking the absorption of toxins and neutralizing absorbed toxins", while the core of first aid for ordinary accidental injuries is to deal with immediate fatal trauma first and avoid secondary injuries. To put it simply, it is a bit like a breakdown at home. Poisoning is caused by the leakage of toxic gas. First, find the source of pollution and block it before dealing with the follow-up. In the accident, the water pipe bursts and the wall covering falls off. First, prevent people from hitting people and block the leakage before talking about anything else.

I have been attending pre-hospital emergency services for almost 5 years. I have encountered this difference too many times. The one that impressed me the most was the two police incidents in the same community that I received in the beginning of summer. They corresponded to two situations: the first one was a family of four who went to the suburbs to pick wild mushrooms and came back to stew chicken. After eating for more than 3 hours, they started to feel sick and had abdominal pain. When I arrived at the scene, I immediately looked for the remaining mushrooms and stew. Residues, ask how much they have eaten and whether they have any underlying diseases, feed warm salt water to the conscious adults to induce vomiting, and synchronize with the emergency center that it is suspected toadstool poisoning, so that antidotes and blood purification channels can be prepared in advance. At this time, even if someone has a small scratch due to unsteadiness, there is no need to deal with it at all. The first priority is to suppress the poison problem.

As soon as the family was put on the bus, the dispatcher called out that a child in the same neighborhood had fallen off a fitness frame and hit his head, bleeding all over his face. When I arrived at the scene, my first reaction was to put pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding. I felt for any misalignment of the cervical vertebrae. I asked my colleagues to put a neck brace on first. The child was crying so hard that I didn’t dare to hold him casually for fear of hidden spinal injuries. At this time, if you ignored the injury and asked if he had eaten the wrong thing to induce vomiting, the blood would flow to the point of shock.

Of course, there is now a lot of discussion in the industry, saying that the boundary between the two is not so clear in many scenarios. For example, carbon monoxide poisoning caused by burning charcoal fires in closed spaces for heating, which is common in winter, belongs to both the poisoning category and the accidental suffocation injury. When entering the scene to rescue, you must first move the person to a ventilated and open place according to the accident disposal requirements, and you must also give high-flow oxygen according to the poisoning process and contact the hyperbaric oxygen chamber in advance. There is no need to be stuck in a certain category, but it will delay the treatment time. There are even some extreme cases, such as after a car accident where the driver suffered trauma and was poisoned by accidentally drinking the antifreeze in the car. In this case, both sides must be treated at the same time, first to stop the bleeding and fix it, and at the same time to give an antidote simultaneously. In this case, there is no either/or argument.

For us ordinary people, there is no need to worry about how to classify. If there is an emergency, we can call 120 as soon as possible to explain clearly what happened at the scene and what symptoms the patient has. It is much more reliable than rigidly following the emergency procedures by ourselves.