2023-07-30 14:25:33
Updated Sunday, July 30, 2023 – 2:25 p.m.
The summer season is a good time to update the home dispensary and clean out expired products
Illustration by LUIS PAREJO
If practically all homes have one thing in common, it is that they have a small first aid kit. Sometimes it is a box, sometimes a small bag and in other homes it is simply a drawer where band-aids, adhesive tape and pills are kept for when something hurts.
A space in the house that we don’t pay much attention to until we burn ourselves out making food, the knife slips from us or our little toe hits the edge of the bed.
What are the essential products?
There are a number of items that should be in absolutely every medicine cabinet:
-Protective material. If we are going to treat someone, the first thing is to protect ourselves: several pairs of latex or vinyl gloves and hydroalcoholic gel could be enough.
-Cure material. Everything necessary to be able to heal small wounds: saline solution to clean the area, gauze and an antiseptic such as povidone or chlorhexidine to prevent infection. An ointment for small burns would also be interesting.
-Material for bandages. We’re not going to do big bandaging, but just enough to protect that wound. We will need tape, adhesive bandages such as plasters, scissors and some elastic bandage that, when the time comes, we may need to cover and press a larger wound while we arrive at an emergency center.
-Thermometer. Essential to know if we have a fever or not.
-Anti-inflammatory cream. Small injuries are the day to day of accidents at home, but fortunately most are resolved with rest and an anti-inflammatory cream.
-Instant cold pack for small bumps
-Analgesics and antipyretics. The classics are paracetamol and ibuprofen, two medications that should not be missing to use on a timely basis.
optional drugs
Depending on the pathologies of each person in the home, there are a series of medications that we should add to that medicine cabinet.
In case of diagnosed severe allergiespre-loaded adrenaline pens can save our lives when the time comes.
And in the case of people with epilepsy We also have special medication for crises that do not subside after a few minutes.
If someone lives at home with insulin treated diabetesour doctor will also have warned us that we must have a medication on hand that could raise the glucose figures if something goes wrong.
The ones we should remove
There are medicine cabinets that were set up when we nurses boiled the needles, and the problem is that they are still intact. In all this time the way of treating wounds has evolved.
– Algon. It can be used for some things, but what is clear is that we should never use it to cure wounds. The fibers are easily released, they end up stuck to the bed of the wound and that will only hinder its healing.
-Mercromina. It was a widely used antiseptic in the 80s, but over the years it has been shown that its potency is low and that it is inactivated if there is blood. Today we have much more effective antiseptics.
-Hydrogen peroxide. It is true that when it comes into contact with a wound it kills all the bacteria it finds… but it also destroys healthy cells and that makes healing more difficult. For this reason it is not the best antiseptic that we can use at home.
-Usual medications. The medicine cabinet is not the place to keep the medicines that people who live at home take daily.
And if I go on a trip?
In that case we must adapt the first-aid kit according to the destination of the trip. Items such as oral rehydration salts will be useful in cases of diarrhea. We should also include an antihistamine cream to relieve insect bites and if we are going to take long walks, a zinc oxide barrier cream may be useful for skin rashes.
Where do I keep it?
In a accessible place and that they know all the people who live at home. must be somewhere cool and dry, out of direct light and where there are no large variations in temperature and humidity, so the kitchen and bathroom are not the best places to store it. Ideally it would be inside an airtight box and make it easy to carry from one place to another.
Be careful with the expiration dates
The expiration It is something that we tend to associate exclusively with medicines, but the rest of the medicine chest products also have an expiration dateand applying an antiseptic to a wound that has exceeded its useful life date is as inadvisable as taking a pill that has also exceeded it.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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