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Summary: Paramedics save lives everyday, including sufferers of severe allergic reactions. Find out how paramedics treat anaphylaxis in this free video.
Views: 540 | Tags: medicine, emergency, help, allergies, allergic-reaction, first-aid
About the Expert
Josh Wells Josh Wells is a firefighter and paramedic in Sedona, Az. He has been at Sedona for 3 years. Prior to that he was a firefighter in Colorado. He first became an... read more
Now I am going to cover how we would go about treating an anaphylactic reaction. Now some of the things I will cover here are specific to where we work in Sedona and it may very from place to place. Again I want to emphasize this is just for trained medical personnel and I am just showing you as a demonstration so that you can get an understanding of how some of this might work. Now I am going to start here. In this we have all of our airway products. And as I mentioned earlier our biggest concern with anaphylactic reaction is the patient keeping an open airway and that the patient is going to breathe okay. After that we want to be concerned about their circulation. Make sure that their blood pressure stays high enough so that they can circulate. So in this box on just about every patient that is having any type of difficulty breathing our first priority is going to be to get them oxygen. Now we have our oxygen cylinder here. Then in here we have different devices that can deliver the oxygen. Now it rages from a nasal cannula; a nasal cannula is just a small one that sits in the nose. That's for low amounts of oxygen. And then we have a non breather mask and that is going to provide a lot more oxygen. With anaphylacsis most likely we are going to go with the most amount of oxygen that we can provide. So these are good when the patients breathing on their own. If the patient gets worse and they are not able to breathe on their own we have here what we call a bag valve mask so that we can breathe for the patient. And then also some other thing that can help to make sure that their airway stays open. This kit's a little more advanced. If the patient were to go unconscious and not be able to maintain their own airway in here we have a bag to where we can intubate the patient. Now intubation for those of you that don't know is where you put a tube down the patient's airway and that way we can keep the airway open and breath for the patient. That would be a worse case scenario. I guess that would be progressively worst case scenario. The absolute worst case scenario would be that this patient's airways were to close completely and we would have to do a cricothyrotomy. That's where we would have to cut the throat and induce an airway that way. Without getting too much into it though this is kind of a basic of the stuff that we provide. Next I am going to go cover some of the medications that we carry and how we might treat them that way.