American Mood Swings Interviews Dr. Faried Banimahd, Addiction Specialist who discusses Narcan and how it saves peoples lives who are overdosing on Opioids.
Hello good evening i’m dr janice morrow with american mood swings and tonight we have dr farid banimad from the american addiction institute of mind medicine here in irvine california so he is an addiction specialist and he has a background in er medicine and we’re very grateful that he’s here tonight there’s so many things i’m going to try not to jump around i
Do want to ask about something called narcon because we’ve seen this a lot in television shows and what happens when somebody has an overdose what is it and how’s it what’s it how’s it saving people from when you walk in your room and a parent walk comes home and has found that their teenager laying there unresponsive and and starts screaming hysterically and what
And we call 9-1-1 what’s happening when they rush over with narcon sure the way narcan works is remember we talked earlier about new receptors and here’s an opiate and it’s binding there whatever it is fentanyl here and and so if you have enough of these that are bound and if you recall we talked about the respiratory drive centers right so you get enough of these
That are bound your respiratory drive is gone the person stopped breathing they don’t even know they’re not breathing and eventually the pulmonary arrest becomes a cardiac arrest when you throw own narcan in what it does is imagine we’re in water and here’s the opiate and it’s in the opiate receptor and so many of them are there that the respiratory drive centers
Are saturated with them you’re not sensing that you’re not breathing the narcan comes in and because of the intrinsic properties without getting into details goes to that receptor where the opiate is says hey get out of here knocks it out goes in there and locks in there now the opiate can’t swim back and knock that out because of certain intrinsic properties
You get enough of those in a short enough period of time all of a sudden the respiratory drive center comes back to life and all of a sudden it goes oh oh i don’t have enough oxygen in my lungs and the person starts breathing the key is you gotta do it quick enough because eventually a pulmonary arrest turns into a cardiac arrest right it’s backwards uh in this
Situation so you got to do it quick enough to be able to do that one other thing i want to point out about that not you know a couple of important things you know nowadays narcan you could get the nasal formula right because and that’s a great thing it’s saving lives everybody should have access to it and be trained in narcan right it’s very simple training this
Is not the same narcan that i use in the er or i used to use it’s very easy to use you just put it in the nose and you could use it there are some barriers depending on the state you’re in i don’t know which state is what because it still has to be written out as a prescription but i can tell you it’s relatively easy to get in most places and everyone should be
Able to get it number two the thing that we need to really point out here is with the fentanyls and the fentanyl analogues it appears that we need to increase the amount of narcan as a first shot thing most people think it’s because fentanyl binds so tightly to that receptor wrong it appears to have something to do with the fat solubility and that doesn’t matter
What’s important to know is that when you’re suspecting fentanyls and that’s very often nowadays people should be aware that you might need to give more than one dose and rapid enough succession defined by the training that you get and i think that’s important to know
Transcribed from video
AMERICAN MOOD SWINGS – NARCAN By American Mood Swings TV with Dr. Janice Morrow
