Household Poison Pearls

YouTube Link

Updates on the Invictus medical review courses with "baby Invictus" for oral exams coming soon and a comprehensive border review course in development. Dr. Sean Nort shares vital insights on common household ingestions, challenging assumptions about what substances actually pose dangers to children.

• Household bleach (3% sodium hypochlorite) ingestion typically requires only reassurance and discharge home
• Industrial bleach is more concerning due to higher concentration
• Most cosmetics, window cleaners, soaps and detergents have minimal toxicity
• Laundry pods can cause more significant caustic burns and sometimes reduced consciousness
• Silica gel packets are extremely safe despite "do not eat" warnings
• Poison control centers are the best resource for managing potential ingestions

Visit invictusreviews.com to learn about our expanding medical education resources and upcoming course offerings.

Chapters

• 0:00 Invictus Course Updates

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

I'm a little bit behind on these because, frankly, so busy with getting Invictus up and running, so we're calling one of them baby Invictus, which is for the oral exams, and that puppy should be up soon. And then the big border view course that we've got so many lectures and emphasis and we're making question banks and summaries and coming along really, really well. We've got a great team, but it's going to take a little bit longer than we thought. You can go to invictusreviews to check out the website and then we'll convert this free podcast into a much more frequent and bigger and better.

Speaker 1: 0:37

What I wanted to do this time was to get a little thing from Sean Nort. He's our resident toxicologist, pharmacologist and emergency physician and he's going to talk about some really common household ingestions and whether they're bad or not. For example, household bleach. Kid drinks that are they going to die? Or those little silica gel things that absorb the water and you find them all over the place. Kid eats those. What do you do for that, plus some other stuff. It's a really short lecture and I love it. I love short lectures, it's like four minutes but it has so many pearls in there that will come up in your practice every day. Ladies and gentlemen, sure or not, the program is Invictus. This is the free podcast Link below for the YouTube, which I think is actually more useful than the audio. But that's just me, and we'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Herbert, but that's just me and we'll talk to you soon. Herbert out Household chemicals. A six year old accidentally drank a small amount of household bleach, three percent sodium hypochlorite, 30 minutes before presenting to the emergency department. She's asymptomatic, other than she has a little bit of mild abdominal pain. What is the recommended treatment? Reassurance and discharge to home. Give a little bit of milk to coat the mucosa, gasic lavage or that's supposed to be activated charcoal. The answer is just reassure them and discharge to home.

Speaker 2: 1:56

Now I want to stress you have to make sure that this is household bleach, because industrial bleach is going to have a much higher concentration. Speak to the poison center. The poison center leaves them at home. They never even send them in. So if the poison center sends them in, you do not have to do anything. And if you want to feel a little bit more comfortable, ask the poison center to follow up on the child later in the day, and they're usually very happy to do that.

Speaker 2: 2:20

Here's a table of some very common household chemicals. I want you to think that most household chemicals like bleach, cosmetics, window cleaner, soaps, detergents all these things are very, very safe, minimally, if any, toxicity. Just call the poison center, because most of them are just sent to home. So household bleach and I stress household bleach because it's got to be lower concentration. Usually they just do fine Cosmetics they shouldn't have any problems with that Window cleaner.

Speaker 2: 2:49

You want to make sure that you find out what it is and speak to the poison center because very often you won't know. But these are usually safe. Any soaps or detergents, you usually do quite fine with that. Now we do worry about some of the pods, so the laundry pods. These can sometimes cause not only a little bit more of a caustic burn but sometimes obtundation. So again, just speak to the poison center or your toxic college. It's in silica gel. This freaks everybody out, particularly a parent, because it was little packets that are in shoes and things like that. It's a desiccant and it says do not eat. But it's super, super safe. But you just want to make sure that it's no longer in the child's mouth because