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Already let’s talk about a medication that we all know something that we’re all comfortable with let’s talk about acetaminophen all right what is the trade name for acetaminophen most common one you’re gonna know is going to be tylenol what are we giving this for we’re giving it for pain and fever very common medication you’re gonna give in icu and eadie and the
Med surg floor wherever you work acetaminophen is something you’re going to see and you’re going to give very often a lot of times for fever you got a patient with a 101 fever you can give them a little bit of tylenol help to bring that down also give them with pain a lot of times its use in conjunction with other medications for pain like your norco has it can
Have 350 tylenol it can have 610 i can have different doses of tylenol in there how does it actually work okay now we know what it does we know why we give it we’re going to be given it every single shift how does it actually work what it does it actually inhibits the synthesis of prostaglandins okay these prostaglandins actually play a role within our body in
Transmission of pain signals and fever response that can also help with inflammation a little bit or play a role in it so what we can do is we actually give this acetaminophen and that inhibits that synthesis so if we’re not able to synthesize and create these prostaglandins that’s going to help to prevent pain and fever from from being transmitted therapeutic
Class is antipyretic what does that mean by retic antipyretic means fever preventer fever reducer whatever and it’s also non-opioid analgesic okay so it can help with the pain without you know the opiate side-effects so but what are some things that we need to keep in mind for a patient taking acetaminophen first and foremost biggest one i want you to keep in
Mind is that we should never exceed four grams of acetaminophen per day and that helps to reduce and limit the risk of liver renal and cardiac damage one of the big things we’re looking at here is going to be liver damage and they’ve actually been studies that possibly it’s even a little bit less than that but what we go with here is we go with our four grand
Maximum limit that sounds like a lot right because we’re getting it in doses of 300 or 600 or 700 but if you give enough of it and if your patient is on like norco it can be very easy for the to very quickly get to their maximum okay if they’re taking norco 350 and 10 every four hours it could be very quick you know within a 24-hour period they’re gonna hit their
Maximum dose of acetaminophen so you kinda have to let your patients know that too when you’re planning that or hope hopefully there’s some sort of adjutant on there to maybe some morphine a milligram morphine you can mix in with this and kind of alternate that so that every time you’re giving pain medicine you’re not giving the norco and every single time and you
Can limit that maybe you can shave some of the edge off the pain with milligram morphine and then interspersed that with some norco you know so you can kind of skip maybe one of those four-hour doses prn doses so your patients not hitting that maximum and causing that liver damage overdose will lead to this at pedo toxicity you see if you’ve worked in a hospital
Long enough you’ve definitely seen a patient come in with tylenol overdose it is not pretty i know that sounds like it seems kind of crazy that household medication could cause these problems but if you ever see a patient take an entire bottle of tylenol it’s very not pretty they’re gonna end up in icu they’re gonna be there for quite a while they’re gonna cause
This massive liver damage and they’ll end up being intubated they have to pump the stomach it’s just very not pretty okay the antidote for this if a patient does overdose who working an idi or you work in a ambulance the antidote for this is a seeded oat ac et ad ote one of the things are a couple of things you want to keep in mind with this as well is that it
May increase the risk for bleeding with warfarin therapy okay so if we’re already giving our warfarin or coumadin adding some tylenol so that can actually increase our risk of bleeding for those patients and it can also alter blood glucose measure this has been another episode of the med master podcast brought to you by med master course comm and in rs ng calm my
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Transcribed from video
Acetaminophen Nursing Considerations, Side Effects and Mechanism of Action Pharmacology for Nurses By NURSINGcom
