I had never heard about this in nursing school, nor through my 3 month orientation at the hospital – could it really be true? It wasn’t until I saw a nurse holding an alcohol swab underneath the nose of a patient who was sitting on the site of the bed, retching while trying to get out of bed for the first time since surgery. The patient took some slow breaths in and out through her nose, as the nurse was telling her to do, and she started to relax – her nausea disappeared.
Lately, I’ve been working in our hospital’s PACU (post anesthesia care unit) where patients come immediately after surgery to wake up before they head home or to their room at the hospital. It is so much quicker to access alcohol swabs as they are consistently within 2 steps of where we’re standing, as opposed to standard medication treatments which are about 50 feet away in a room where I need to swipe my ID card to enter, then enter my username and fingerprint to obtain access to drugs. I don’t have any information on the cost to the hospital or the patient for these anti-nausea medications, but I can only assume that they cost more than the penny or so that an alcohol swab costs.
I started searching for research that talks about this topic and found a journal article in Nursing Research from 2002 that explains the theory well. It talks about mechanisms of vomiting, what makes us puke after anesthesia and how the traditional medication treatments work to affect nausea. They also did a research study in a hospital using a control group of traditional medication treatments and rubbing alcohol as a treatment and their results came out to show no significant difference in nausea reduction between the treatments.
Just some food for thought. I thought this was an interesting topic since I work in a unit that seems to primarily see surgical patients.
Hrmm. Interesting. I’ve been in the post surgical setting all this time and never heard of that. Even as a psychosomatic placebo effect it’s got a leg up on all antiemetics that I hate giving because they either snow or make my patients loony. :) I’ll have to try that one next time.
My daughter was nauseous when she woke from surgery and the nurse gave her an alcohol swab to hold beneath her nose until IV anti-nausea medication could be administered. It did the trick!