What is the difference between poisoning and accidental first aid

The core difference between the two is actually that the priority of traceability and intervention logic before rescue are completely different. Ordinary emergency first aid gives priority to dealing with obvious fatal injuries, while first aid for poisoning must first identify the source of the poison before proceeding.

Take a commonly encountered scene as an example. If you encounter an injured person who fell unconscious while riding an electric bicycle on the road, even if you don’t know whether he was hit by a car or fell by hiding from a cat, as long as you check the breathing and heartbeat first, apply pressure to the bleeding site to stop the bleeding, and wait for 120 if you dare not move casually, you will basically not make a big mistake. But the poisoning scene is completely different. Last time, a family in the community suffered from vomiting and diarrhea after eating self-picked mushrooms. The neighbor kindly gave them antiemetic medicine first. However, when they arrived at the hospital, the doctor said that it was not helpful - the toxins could have been excreted through vomiting, but such a blockage accumulated in the gastrointestinal tract, which instead increased the burden on the liver and kidneys. If the vomitus and remaining mushroom samples could have been kept and sent to the hospital, the antidote could have been used faster.

There is another difference that many people have not noticed, which is that the rescuers’ self-protection priorities are very different. For ordinary bumps, falls or even traffic accidents, rescuers only need to be careful not to touch the open wounds of the injured, and most of them do not need to use additional protection; but poisoning is different, especially unexplained mass syncope, or there is a pungent smell at the scene. If you rush forward without wearing any protection, you can easily become the second injured person. There was a case in a chemical park two years ago, where a worker accidentally knocked over a toxic reagent and fainted on the spot. The co-worker next to him rushed in without wearing any first aid. In the end, both people were not rescued. If he had been ventilated first and put on a gas mask before going in, the result might have been completely different.

Of course, there are different voices in the industry now. They think that whether it is poisoning or an ordinary accident, the first step is to confirm the safety of the environment. This core principle is common, but the risk of poisoning is often more hidden - for example, if you think it is an ordinary passerby who fainted due to hypoglycemia, it is very likely that Poisoning may be caused by the volatilization of the uncovered pesticide barrel next to it. You may also be infected if you don't pay attention and squat down to rescue. Therefore, in many general first aid trainings, "checking for poisoning risks" is also added to the pre-processing process. It can also be regarded as the fusion of the two first aid modes in the basic logic.

To put it bluntly, it is actually a bit like repairing a malfunctioning electrical appliance: an ordinary accident is like a home appliance falling and the casing is cracked and cannot be turned on. You need to fix the most fatal hardware failure first, and then check the cause. In fact, no matter what kind of first aid, the ultimate goal is to preserve vital signs first, but the pitfalls to avoid are different in different situations. Learn more relevant knowledge, and you will not panic when you encounter something.