Hi, Doctor Bernard here. Don’t do this. Just because Benadryl is over the counter
doesn’t mean it can’t do bad things. Even taking it as directed for allergies,
often nets people a dullness and mental fog that lasts in to the next day. DON’T DO IT. JC is a 21 year old woman, presenting to the
emergency room, unconscious. Her dad Scott, tells the admitting nurse that
she had at least 3 seizures in the past hour. The last one went on for more than 15 minutes,
before he saw his daughter fall limp like a rag doll. You see, JC was a regular college student
in 2020. She just finished her finals, although, she
had already moved back home earlier that spring, because of pandemic. This summertime break, was a good chance for
her to pump up her internet following. With TikTok being the favorite of all her
friends, she was going to become internet famous. A small trend was growing over the weekend. #BenadrylChallenge This is going to be something big, she thought. Back when she still had classes in person,
she heard about Benadryl being able to “open someone’s mind.” Some of her friends tried it on the weekends. She thought she had tried it during her freshman
year, but couldn’t remember. She couldn’t really remember anything from
that year. Haha TikTok meme she thought this time around,
as she danced around on camera with 2 whole bottles of Benadryl, before dumping them into
her mouth. And immediately after finishing both bottles,
JC didn’t really feel anything. She was going to be famous now. She was going to get 10 million views. “Allergy medicine go glug glug” she thought. And what she didn’t realize is that the
dose of both bottles combined, can be fatal. As the hour passed, JC could feel a burning
sensation at the base of her neck. Her ceiling became like jello, wobbling around. But ceilings are cringe. Im floor gang now, she thought. Always have been. JC had never felt more relaxed, as she turned
on some music. She could hear people chanting her name over
the speakers. That’s the sound of being TikTok famous,
she thought. She tried recording more videos of her trip,
but eventually she forgot what she was doing. Her vision was blurry, but she didn’t need
her eyes to see anymore. There was a drum beating faster and faster
in her chest. Her mouth was like a desert, devoid of water,
and her teeth were giant stones, grinding each other down into sand. JC looked at the clock. 12 hours had passed. Her dad had come up to her and asked, “how
many Benadryl did you drink?” But she wasn’t sure if that was a hallucination
or not. She said she took 10 million, which is how
many TikTok views she’d get, as she suffers her first seizure. In reality, no one was around. Her dad hadn’t seen JC since hours before
she took the Benadryl, as she falls unconscious on the floor. As Scott walks in on his daughter, he sees
her suffer her third seizure. While he called 911, and while the ambulance
was on its way, JC’s seizure wouldn’t stop. But when paramedics arrived, she fell limp. Her dad had no idea what happened as she arrives
to the emergency room, where we are now. At examination, JC was unresponsive. She was flushed, but she didn’t have a fever. Her heart rate was 180 beats per minute, about
3 times more than normal, but her blood pressure was 70 over 40, about half of normal. No one there had any idea that JC had taken
a whole bottle of Benadryl, but there’s a few clues as to what could be happening. JC’s skin was red, but she wasn’t sweating. Her pupils were dilated, and were minimally
reactive to light. Her mouth was dry, just like all her mucous
membranes. Her heart was beating fast. All of this together, signals anticholinergic
poisoning. But what does that mean? What is a cholinergic? And what does it have to do with Benadryl? Well, Benadryl is an allergy medicine. Its chemical name is diphenhydramine. Lots of people take it in the spring, when
flowers are blooming. Pollen and allergens cause people to sneeze. To cough. To have a runny and stuffed nose. The body thinks these allergens are foreign
objects that need to be removed. What’s a good way to remove things? Well you could dilate the blood vessels, and
make them more leaky, in the hopes that the allergens will leak out. Benadryl stops this allergic reaction by stopping
the signal for it, which is from a natural chemical that’s made in your body, called
histamine. Hist from histidine, which is an amino acid,
a building block of proteins in your body, and amine referring to nitrogen which is a
base word for amino acid. But if Benadryl is just an over the counter
allergy medicine, why did it cause JC to hallucinate? It’s not like you’re stopping allergies
in the brain! And why is her heart beating so fast? As the doctors keep examining her, they find
she has a pulse, but her heart is beating in a way, that if nothing is done about it,
her heart will just shake in place, and won’t be able to produce an actual contraction. Doctors shock her in to a normal heart rhythm. And after this happens, JC’s dad realizes
his daughter had posted some TikTok videos of her drinking 2 whole bottles of diphenhydramine. He shows this to the doctors, and it tells
them everything that they need to know. Diphenhydramine inactivates histamine receptors. It doesn’t stop the immune system from releasing
histamine, it stops your body from interacting with it. When you take the dose on the instructions
for allergies, this inactivates enough of the histamine receptors, so that you don’t
have a reaction. But if someone takes too much, like lets say
a 2 WHOLE BOTTLES, then that person is going to have a lot of diphenhydramine floating
around in the body, meaning it’s going to interact with more than just histamine receptors. But, what else would that be? Well, if you’ve ever taken diphenhydramine,
you know it can make you sleepy. That’s why it’s branded as a sleep aid
too. Some parents give it to their kids before
a flight so that the kid will sleep on the plane and not cause a ruckus. You shouldn’t do that to your kids. But if you’ve ever taken it for sleep, you
know you don’t wake up feeling great. All of this means that Benadryl acts on the
brain. Which is clearly what it did to KC because
as doctors transfer her into the intensive care unit, she suffers her fourth seizure. Nurses had to give medicine to stop the seizure,
because it wouldn’t stop on its own. The Benadryl deposits not just in her brain,
but in all her organs because she took so much of it. This brings us to an idea called lipophilicty. Lipo meaning fat and philic meaning affinity
for. Benadryl is lipophilic, meaning it dissolves
in fat. We know that water doesn’t mix well with
oil, which is a fat. Outside of the cells in the human body, there’s
a bilipid layer, meaning your cells are coated and defined by a layer of fat. This would mean that a lot of Benadryl doesn’t
want to be in the blood, because blood is mostly made of water— it would want to be
in the cells, so it can interact with that bilipid layer. And, more than 60% of the brain is made of
fat, which is how Benadryl would get in. Do you remember those histamine receptors? Well they’re not just in the lungs and the
skin to cause an allergic reaction. They’re also in the brain. And while histamine can cause blood vessels
to dilate and become leaky elsewhere in the body, in the brain it does different things. It regulates sleep and wakefulness, so if
Benadryl is there, cells don’t respond to histamine anymore, so there’s no more regulation,
and no more wakefulness. That’s how it causes drowsiness. Histamine’s also involved in cognition. So if Benadryl is there to block it, then
there’s less cognition. Less cognition could mean more hallucinations,
which sounds a lot like JC’s case. Histamine also has anticonvulsant activity,
so if Benadryl is there to inactivate it, then there would be convulsant activity, explaining
her seizures. But she doesn’t just have a little bit of
Benadryl in her body, she has 2 whole bottles of it. But if it’s sitting in her organs, blocking
all the histamine receptors, and there’s still a lot of it floating around, what else
would it block? This brings us back to “anticholinergic
poisoning.” A “cholinergic” refers to the naturally
occurring chemical called choline. Which happens to have a similar structure
to Benadryl. One part of your nervous system signals for
“rest and digest.” This is mediated by the chemical acetylcholine,
which is made inside your body. And cholinergic receptors, take in acetylcholine
to promote “rest and digest.” But interestingly enough, since we have sequenced
the entire human genome, we know what the DNA in our body makes. Nature likes to conserve things, and our genome
tells us that almost half of this cholinergic receptor, is just like the histamine receptor. And because Benadryl isn’t too different
in structure from choline, then it means having a massive amount of Benadryl in the body,
would cause it to bind to cholinergic receptors too. A lot of Benadryl means a lot of these cholinergic
receptors don’t get acetylcholine anymore, they get Benadryl instead, meaning, JC’s
body can’t signal “rest and digest” either. Without a digest signal, her mouth becomes
dry so no more saliva. Her stomach muscles don’t move anymore. She becomes flushed, but can’t sweat. She can’t and hasn’t urinated since she
took the whole bottle of Benadryl. Her pupils become dilated. And her heart doesn’t slow down, it speeds
up to the point where it shakes in place and doesn’t actually produce a real contraction. In the intensive care unit, doctors give medicines
to try and stabilize her heart rhythm. Benadryl doesnt just stop the histamine signal,
it doesn’t JUST stop the rest and digest signal. It also blocks sodium going in to heart muscle
cells because the other part of its shape happens to fit in those receptors in the heart
too. And because JC took a huge amount of it, there’s
enough extra floating around to block anything where it can fit. Is there any way we could happen to pull it
out of her organs? Well, maybe. But in most cases, this is treated by.. waiting
it out. Give medicines to stabilize her heart. Give medicines to stop her seizures if they
happen. Ventilate her so that a machine breathes for
her because she can’t do it on her own. But maybe, there is a way we can exploit the
chemical property of Benadryl to treat her. Bringing us back to lipophilicity. If Benadryl dissolves in fat, but not water,
could we somehow infuse fat into her veins in the hopes that it would pull out Benadryl
from her organs? At this thought, doctors infused the lipid
emulsion used to feed critically ill patients, intravenously. JC’s heart rhythm didn’t change after
the first infusion. It’s still unstable. Twenty minutes later, doctors infuse another
bolus in, and then, her heart stabilizes, and throughout the duration of her stay in
the hospital, she never has another abnormal heart rhythm. In several case reports of this intravenous
lipid emulsion therapy for various toxicities, a positive inotropy was observed, meaning
after infusion of fat emulsion, the heart beats harder and stronger. It’s possible that it could be the heart
muscle changing energy source from glucose to fatty acid from the emulsion. But it could also be additional volume in
the blood stretching the heart and causing a rebound reflex. Or it could just be because the toxicity has
been reversed. That’s the good part. Sometimes, that bolus of fat can cause pancreatitis,
cause the pancreas is supposed to help break down fats, and it can also cause acute respiratory
distress, that would be the bad part. But in this case, JC turned out OK. And on day 3 of hospitalization, she pulled
out the tube that was down her throat. Confused as to where she was, her dad explained
to her everything that happened, as she realized that the TikTok fame wasn’t worth the memes,
especially since she felt a mental fog and haze from the event, for several months afterwards. Viral following is almost never worth it. Because fast up is fast down. Brightest stars burn out the fastest. Thanks so much for watching, take care of
yourself, and be well.
Man I used to love this guys videos, thanks for reminding me to go check his youtube out again.
Not to shit on this guy but he sure likes to repeat himself. Also his overly dramatic editing style reminds me of those sensationalized true crime and medical case tv shows.
Really cool
I wonder where he gets all this information.
these kids are soo dumb it hurts my brain. if they did a tiny bit of research on the drugs they are putting into their bodies they could injest far less dph and instead sub in some dxm and get a far more enjoyable result.