Poison

If you swallow something poisonous, you need to vomit as soon as possible

Finding out your child has swallowed something potentially poisonous can be a harrowing experience. Unfortunately, many people’s first instinct is to try and get them to vomit it up. It makes sense, doesn’t it? If the poison is bad, get it out of the stomach as quickly as possible.

There are so many reasons that this is a bad idea. First of all, when you vomit up a substance, you seriously increase the chance that it can go into the lungs. This is very, very bad. And, with some substances, like products made from petroleum, the vapor can cause a bad pneumonia. Moreover, sometimes children and adults can have an altered consciousness after swallowing something bad, which can greatly increase the risk of having things go into their lungs that should not.

A lot of things that children unintentionally swallow are very likely to burn their throats. Anything alkaline, including many dish-washing and cleaning products, is likely to chemically burn tissues with which it comes into contact. Vomiting these products increases the exposure to the throat an additional time (while also putting the lungs at risk). Vomiting is a terrible idea with these.

And there are other reasons not to induce vomiting. Vomiting increases the pressure in the stomach, which can increase absorption of stomach contents. You definitely do not want the person to absorb more of what they swallowed. Vomiting, once begun, can be hard to control and stop. Some of the methods to induce vomiting can also be dangerous themselves. People have been known to force the swallowing of salt water, which is not a good idea. Salt water can actually irritate the lining of your stomach and intestines, possibly even making you absorb more of the poison, and too much salt water without other fluids can lead to dehydration. Moreover, using salt water to make someone vomit is a bad idea for many of the same reasons that using ipecac to force vomiting is bad—which we’ll get to momentarily. The chemical that was swallowed might cause worse burns as it comes back up, and the vomiting could cause you to aspirate or to breathe in the chemicals or poisons that were swallowed. Shoving your fingers into another’s throat can also cause harm.

And all of this ignores the fact that vomiting isn’t a particularly good way to completely evacuate or clear out the stomach.

This all brings us to ipecac. Once again, the medical field is partly to blame for perpetuating a medical myth. For decades, we advised parents and families to have a bottle of ipecac on hand, in case we ever wanted a person to induce vomiting in just this situation. The problem is that ipecac doesn’t really do any good (for many of the reasons mentioned above), and it can potentially do a lot of harm (again, see above). Ipecac makes people vomit, but there are far too many reasons why vomiting that poison up might be a bad idea.

In a landmark study published in Pediatrics in 2003, Dr. Gary Bond showed that in a review of sixty-four U.S. poison centers and over 750,000 calls to poison centers, the use of ipecac did nothing to prevent resource utilization including hospitalizations. It also did nothing to improve patient outcomes at all. Even if you used ipecac, you still had to come to the hospital. And it did not prevent any of the harms that come when you swallow something you should not. The American Academy of Pediatrics, and many other organizations, subsequently changed their recommendations and told people to throw out the ipecac. We would advise you to do the same! If you think your child, or anyone else, has swallowed something poisonous or harmful, you should always, and we mean always, call a poison control center. The phone number for the national center is 1-800-222-1222.