What is the difference between poisoning and accidental first aid?

The core difference between the two, to put it bluntly, is that the priority of tracing the cause of the disease and the first goal of treatment are completely different. First aid for ordinary accidents gives priority to stopping losses, and first aid for poisoning gives priority to detoxification.

I have been in the emergency room for almost five years, and last week I met two children who were brought in front and back. One fell his arm while playing on the slide in the community. When he was brought here, his parents had already fixed it with cardboard so that he could not move around. During the treatment, he only needed to set the bones and reduce the swelling, and there was no problem.； The other was that he secretly ate the rodent bait at home. The parents panicked and fed him half a cup of hot water, which accelerated the dissolution and absorption of the poison. He had to wash his stomach three times before he stabilized it. Only those ten minutes of disposal sequence were missing, and the risk was greatly reduced.

Many people may not realize that even the most basic judgment of "whether the injured can be moved", the logic of the two types of first aid is completely different. In ordinary accidents, such as car accidents and falling from high altitudes, the first principle is to try not to move as much as possible to avoid secondary injuries caused by displacement of the spine or fractures, unless there is a risk of falling things or catching fire in the place where you are staying. ； But the opposite is true for poisoning. If you encounter carbon monoxide poisoning or pesticide poisoning on the skin, don’t think too much about anything. Drag the person to a clean and ventilated place first, remove all the poison-stained clothes and wash them clean. It doesn’t matter even if the skin is scratched during the dragging. If the person is inhaled more than two minutes later, the person may not be able to be saved.

Most of the disagreements about first aid that are getting louder on the Internet now focus on the first aid for poisoning. For example, if you accidentally drink corrosive poisons such as toilet cleaning liquid and strong alkali, the guidelines a few years ago also said that you should give priority to inducing vomiting. Now more and more clinical cases prove that inducing vomiting will cause corrosive substances to repeatedly burn the esophagus and throat. On the contrary, it is better to pour cold pure milk or egg white to neutralize it first, and then send the patient to the hospital as soon as possible. This difference in treatment depending on the type of poison is rare in ordinary accident first aid. After all, the logic is to stop the bleeding first if you fall, or apply cold compress to the sprained foot, and it will not change much depending on whether the person fell on tiles or wooden floors.

When I usually go to the community to do first-aid science popularization, the most common misunderstanding is that everyone always treats poisoning as an ordinary accident. Last year, an uncle sprayed dichlorvos at home to kill cockroaches. He was poisoned and dizzy. His wife's first reaction was to help him lie down on the bed, cover him with a quilt, and soak him. I gave him a cold medicine, but when it was delivered, a lot of the pesticides on the surface of the skin had seeped into it, which took a long time. If it was a common cold, it would be fine, but if he was poisoned, it would be equivalent to "covering" the poison on the body and letting it be slowly inhaled, which was completely unhelpful.

It’s easy to understand. An ordinary accident is like dropping your mobile phone on the ground and breaking the screen. The first reaction is to pick it up before being stepped on again, and fix the broken area first to prevent it from getting worse.； Poisoning is like if your phone has been soaked in water. Your first reaction is to quickly take it out, dig out the battery, and shake off the water. Otherwise, no matter how hard you try to protect the external screen, the motherboard will be burned and it will be all in vain. If you really encounter an emergency, you don’t have to worry about the difference between the two. When you call 120, you can tell you immediately whether you fell, touched, ate the wrong thing, or touched something poisonous. The operator will teach you step by step how to deal with it, which is much more reliable than trying to figure it out on your own.