What is the difference between poisoning and accidental first aid

The core difference between the two is that the risk traceability logic and rescue and protection priorities are completely different, followed by the difference in subsequent disposal paths.

In the past four or five years as a community first aid volunteer, I have encountered too many situations where ordinary people treated poisoning as an ordinary accident and almost got themselves involved. Last month, a resident in the old town fainted at home. Neighbors thought he had high blood pressure, so he opened the door and rushed in to help him. After taking two steps, he felt dizzy and nauseated. Later, he discovered that the house was burning charcoal for heating without opening the windows, causing carbon monoxide poisoning. The whole house was filled with toxic gases. If he had stayed there for two more minutes, the rescuers would have had to take him to the hospital.

Think about it, ordinary accidents, whether it is falling downstairs, being cut by a knife, or fainting due to a sudden heart attack, the cause of injury is single and instantaneous. Once it has happened, it will not continue to hurt people. When you go to the scene to rescue, you don’t have to worry about whether you will be implicated. You can just check your vital signs and deal with obvious fatal injuries as soon as possible. But poisoning is different. Most of the toxic factors are diffusible and persist. They either float in the air, are stained on the patient's clothes, or are still unabsorbed in the patient's digestive tract. If you rush in like a normal accident, you may be the first one to be infected.

To put it bluntly, it's like repairing a broken power strip. A common accident is that the power strip has been cracked and the plug has been pulled out. You can just go ahead and check which part is broken; poisoning means that the power strip is still plugged into the socket and leaking electricity. You have to turn off the main switch, pull out the plug, and confirm that there is no risk before touching the equipment, otherwise the repairman will be stunned first.

The difference in specific operations is also obvious. In ordinary emergency first aid, the most fatal obvious problems are dealt with first. For example, if there is massive bleeding, press to stop the bleeding first. If the airway is blocked, perform Heimlich immediately. If the heartbeat stops, perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation immediately. However, the first step in first aid for poisoning is always to block the source of the poison from continuing to invade. If the skin is stained with pesticides, you must first take off the poison-stained clothes and flush the skin with plenty of water. If the poison is taken orally, you must first consider how to expel the unabsorbed poison. However, there is quite a controversy in the industry. Some people think that as long as the patient is conscious, he or she may just eat it. Poisons can induce vomiting within an hour. Some experts believe that ordinary rescuers are inexperienced. Inducing vomiting can easily cause the vomit to be choked into the lungs and cause suffocation. The risk is higher than the absorption of toxins. When we dispatch the police, we usually only induce vomiting for the injured who are fully awake within 15 minutes of taking the poison. The rest of the cases are left to wait for medical care to handle.

In fact, ordinary people don’t need to remember these differences too hard. If you encounter someone in trouble, you should first scan the surroundings to see if there are empty medicine bottles, strange odors, or if there are many people with the same symptoms at the same time. When you call 120, explain these details clearly, and the dispatcher will tell you directly what to do first, which is much more reliable than trying to figure it out on your own.