A Toddler Drank His Mom's Essential Oils. This Is What Happened To His Brain.

Hi everyone, Dr Bernard here. Essential oils  can be very, powerful, just like this mother   son combo will find out. As always, references  to subject matter with links to similar cases   published in literature in the description  below. This is not an uncommon poisoning,   as I will demonstrate in this video, which is published in 8K. I make  a new video every month so if you subscribe,   turn on all notifications and hit like  we’ll get some gas station nachos together. A Boy Accidentally Drank His Mom’s Essential  Oils. This Is What Happened To His Brain. BB is a 3 year old boy, presenting to the  emergency room with nausea, vomiting, and   tachypnea. Tachy meaning fast and pnea referring  to breath. He was breathing quick and struggling. His mother Megan, tells the admitting  nurse that she found her son on the floor   face down in a pool of his own stomach contents.   She turned him over to see his face,  and she couldn’t believe what she saw. 18 months ago, Megan started  having trouble with her arms   and her legs. Everyday, she would notice that  her shoulders and hips would hurt. Her hands   would be swollen up and down her fingers to  the point where just bending them would hurt. Megan thought maybe she had developed arthritis.  You know, body’s different after having kids now,   but this shouldn’t be a problem. Years ago, when  she had just finished college, Megan had gotten   in to essential oils, just as a fun thing  to do with some of her friends. She wanted   to live a more natural lifestyle and she loved  the smell of things like lavender and tangerine. In her mind, she connected the dots, arthritis  and the oils. She remembered, that there’s some   oils that can be used topically for pain,  to calm and cool down what she assumed was   inflammation happening in her body, attacking  her joints and causing pain. She had some of   this wintergreen oil left over from years past.  It’s the same stuff they have in other pain   relief creams that they sell over the counter. “Why not mix it with   some carrier oils and rub it on all the parts  that hurt,” she thought. And everything seemed   to go great. Megan and her son were able to be  happy and healthy because mom was pain free. But a few months later, Megan’s arthritis  came back and it would wax and wane. The oils had child safety caps on top, where  one has to push down with more concentrated   force than a child could know to exert. But  because Megan’s hands would hurt so bad,   she elected to change the caps to ones without  the safety. You could simply screw these ones   on and off, without the need to push down  first. Megan knew the risk of doing this   was that her son could potentially get into  the oils now, but it’s alright she thought,   just make sure to put them out of reach so he  can’t get to them, and there will be no problem, she thought. But there was a problem. One day Megan was  making her wintergreen ointment sitting down   on a coffee table, she got a phone  call from her boss. She stepped aside   as she left all her oils out on a  table. Some ointment was already made,   and so she wasn’t totally aware of how much oil  was left in each bottle when she walked away.   BB not knowing any better, got a hold of the  oils as he started drinking. When she got back,   the bottles of her oils seemed toppled over, it  was kind of messy. She didn’t remember if she had   knocked some over in the rush to pick up the call  from her boss, so she didn’t think too much of it. Over the next several hours, the oils settle  and absorb in to BB’s body and his mother has   no idea what had happened. He starts to  act lethargic, but his breathing becomes   fast and labored. He doesn’t act like how  he normally does for that time of day,   as he empties his stomach on to the carpet.  Megan finds him face down on the floor,   in a panic as she calls for 911 and he’s  brought to the emergency room where we are now. At examination, doctors notice BB  had a fever, and his breathing was   fast and labored. When they listened to his lungs,  they were clear, he didnt have a blocked airway,   so his tachypnea probably isn’t from some kind  of congestion or fluid buildup in his lungs,   at least not yet. Because hes 3 years old, he  can’t verbalize to anyone how he’s feeling.   No one knew he drank anything and he can’t tell  anyone he did. And Megan hasn’t connected in her   mind yet that BB being this way is related to  her essential oils being messy on that table. A blood test finds that BB has low bicarbonate  presence in blood, but what does that mean?   Bicarb is one part of baking soda, which is sodium  bicarbonate. If you remember from middle or high   school, there was a small science experiment where  you mix vinegar with baking soda to get a chemical   reaction because vinegar is an acid and baking  soda is a base. So if BB has low bicarbonate,   then it means he has low base presence in blood.  The body’s a balanced system, so if base is low,   and acid is opposite of base, then it mean he  has too much acid. This is called acidosis.   Acid formally defined as the concentration of  hydrogen ion, and -osis referring to a disorder.   An acid disorder, bringing us to the essential  oils of his mother that he accidentally drank. Some essential oils, probably won’t  cause problems if you drink them.   But some of them are extreme extracts of  things that are fine to put on the skin,   but the moment they get ingested and  absorb into the body, they become poison. Megan used wintergreen oil as an arthritis remedy,  and that’s great. It does an awesome job at that   because the active ingredient contained therein,  is methyl salicylate. The salicylate moiety you   might recognize from the chemical name of aspirin,  acetyl salicylic acid. In the body, they become   the same salicylate, and this is one of the most  common over the counter therapies. Even Pepto   Bismol is known as Bismuth sub salicylate.  You can even find salicylate in face wash. This makes sense with Megan’s use.  Aspirin is an anti inflammatory medicine,   it’s how it relives pain. You could apply it  on the skin where some of it gets absorbed,   or you can take tablets of it by mouth.  The problem is wintergreen oil is really   concentrated. The bottle BB drank  has the equivalent of at least 66   big aspirin tablets. Just 1/3 of this bottle  alone can be fatal if taken by mouth in a child.   And BB drank 3 times that fatal dose, because  he drank the entire bottle. Even though BB   can’t tell doctors what happened, their findings  from examining him give them some more clues. The interesting thing about the body is that  it regulates acid base balance quickly through   breathing. We inhale oxygen. But we exhale CARBON  dioxide. And this bring us back to biCARBONate. The blood delivers oxygen all throughout  the body, so what we breathe in,   goes from our lungs right in to our  blood. But blood is made of water. And   if we’re trying to put oxygen in to it by  inhaling, then it means at the same time,   carbon dioxide is in the blood ready  to get exchanged out by exhaling. The reason why this is important, is because  when Carbon Dioxide is dissolved in Water,   it exists as a balanced system with  biCARBONate and acid. This tells the   medical team a lot about what’s happening  in BB. He has low bicarbonate in his blood,   meaning there’s more acid than base. Going  backwards in the understanding of blood,   hes breathing fast meaning his body is desperately  trying to push excess carbon dioxide out as a way   to fix the acidosis. But things keep getting  worse. BB falls unconscious in the hospital   as he’s admitted in. As doctors take another  blood test, they find that he now has acidemia.   It’s not just low base presence in blood  now, but there’s an acid presence in blood,   meaning that it’s starting to spill all throughout  his body. But where is this acid coming from? This brings us back to BB’s  fever. When energy is consumed,   heat is created. When the body consumes a lot  more energy than it can create, then too much   heat gets generated, leading to hyperthermia,  high body temperature, but why is this happening? Inside the cells, there’s a powerhouse called  the mitochondria. It generates energy in the   form of ATP, by using electricity, the movement of  positive and negative charges, just like you see   on a battery. But when salicylate is inside the  mitochondria, it flows freely going back and   forth wherever it wants, and starts to disturb the  electrical flow. As this short circuit is formed,   ATP isn’t made anymore. But cells need that  energy. They can detect that something is   wrong but they don’t know why. The powerhouse  keeps working harder and harder kind of like   a hamster running in a wheel and because the  wheel doesn’t touch the ground, the hamster   can run forever and not get anywhere. Salicylate  toxicity forces the mitochondria to run in place,   never actually producing any energy. As the  wheels keep spinning faster and harder, massive   amounts of heat are released and because energy is  only consumed and not made in BB’s body anymore,   this is one part of where his carbon  dioxide and acidosis are coming from. The tachypnea, the metabolic acidosis, the  nausea and vomiting before falling unconscious.   Doctors ask Megan if her son had accidentally  eaten something or drank some kind of chemical,   specifically something related to aspirin.   Already in a panic, she said she didnt know, she  didnt think he did, but then it dawned on her.   She left her essential oils out when she  stepped aside to talk to her boss on the phone.   The bottles didnt have child safety caps. She  came back to them and saw a big mess that she   didnt remember leaving. As she tells doctors  every single oil that BB could have drank,   their blood test returns, and it confirms  everything, because he has high salicylate   presence in blood from drinking a bottle bottle  of wintergreen oil, made of methyl salicylate. Finding the problem is great for the doctors, but  things are only getting worse now. BB’s acidemia   is intensifying. More acid has spilled into his  blood compared to just a couple hours before,   and because he’s unconscious now, it  means that his brain is now affected,   but how did the brain get involved?? We’ve already established that cells need a lot  of energy to function, but in toxic settings,   huge amounts of salicylate forces cells  to use more energy than they can create.   One function of cells is to maintain their fluid  balance. A cell doesnt want to be super bloated,   it also doesnt want to be shriveled  up. To maintain the balance of fluid,   cells can’t just pull water from  the outside and shove it in.   But what they can do is manipulate sodium, because  wherever sodium is, water will flow towards it. In this small science experiment, I dissolve  salt in this water and place it into a semi   permeable tube meaning that only water and  nothing else can flow in and out of it.   I place this tube in a pool of distilled  water that has no salt dissolved in it and   you’ll see that water enters the tube. That  water flows towards where there’s sodium. If cells can pump sodium in and  out, they can control their fluid balance. This pumping of electrolytes requires energy, which  if the cells aren’t making anymore and they’re   starting to run out of it, then it means that  they can’t control their own fluid balance. Sodium doesnt get pumped out of  the cell anymore. Water flows in and the cells become bloated. When all the  cells become bloated, the organ becomes bloated.   The brain starts to swell up and expand into the  skull. But this is only the start of the problem. The thing about salicylate as a chemical is  that it exists as a second form, in a balance   with itself as salicylic acid. Salicylate has  an electrical property associated with it,   a negative charge. The reason this is important,  is because when a chemical has a charge,   it cannot enter or exit a cell by itself. But  salicylic acid isn’t charged. Salicylic acid,   enters and exits cells however and whenever  it wants to. And because BB has acidemia,   a high hydrogen ion presence in blood, it means  that there’s so much hydrogen floating around,   salicylate only exists as salicylic acid, as it  now starts to flood in to every single organ. The brain’s not only swelling now because it  doesnt have enough energy to maintain fluid   balance, but it starts discharging. The heart  starts beating in strange rhythms because muscle   needs a lot of energy, but as salicylic  acid disturbs all ATP production,   the cells can’t keep up. Fluid starts flowing  in to the lungs because those cells don’t   have enough energy to maintain fluid balance.  BB’s body tried the best it could to breathe   out extra carbon dioxide and push out the acid  in his blood to protect his organs from this,   but the flood of wintergreen oil he  drank simply overwhelmed this mechanism. Is there anything the medical team can do at this  point to reverse this? By the time they asked   Megan if BB had accidentally eaten something or  drank some kind of chemical, they started to take   measures for what they thought could be happening.  If he has acidemia and acidosis, specifically has   low bicarbonate presence in blood, then the answer  is to give him bicarbonate. This will push the   balance of acid down. As more base is infused in  to his blood, it prevents salicylate from becoming   salicylic acid, forcing it to keep its electrical  charge so it can’t enter in to his organs. Additional measures were taken by doctors to force  base in to BB’s urine. This allows the body to use   the kidneys to filter and concentrate salicylate  so that it can be eliminated in the urine. There isn’t much that can be done once most  salicylate becomes salicylic acid in the body   during a toxic event because there isn’t an easy  way to suck it out of the organs. In some cases,   patients will appear to be ok and within a couple  hours, the aspirin toxicity will overtake them,   permanently. The clinical decline can  happen quickly and suddenly in this setting.   The only thing we can do now is to make the blood  basic as quickly as possible to prevent all of   that from happening. And luckily the medical team  were able to catch it just in time in BB’s case. After several days in the hospital,  and a lesson learned by Megan to take   great caution in never exposing  any risk ever with any potential   household danger to her son, BB  was able to make a full recovery. Thanks so much for watching. Take  care of yourself. And Be Well.

Channel: Chubbyemu

Views: 1,977,347

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Id: TZr0nt2hxbs

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/nitpickyCorrections]

Which part is pseudoscience?