'People were just bleeding': Doctors describe tainted pot emergency
People were just bleeding': Doctors describe tainted pot emergency
Giant doses of vitamin K can stop the bleeding, doctors say.
Some of the patients were coming in with bleeding from almost every orifice: their ears, their eyes, in their urine. Their symptoms were mysterious and severe and emergency room doctors across much of Illinois were mystified.
Some worried about Ebola, the viral hemorrhagic fever feared for the uncontrolled bleeding it was reputed to cause. Others struggled to dose patients with fresh plasma, which delivers natural blood clotting factors.
After frantic calls to one another across the state, doctors figured out that the patients had all been using synthetic marijuana — a product known variously as K2, Spice, Kush, Kronic, or Scooby Snax. It provided a cheap high and was sold in gas stations and convenience stores.
But why such dramatic injuries?
“People were just bleeding from some unknown cause,” said Dr. Jonathan Roberts, a blood specialist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria.
More calls and more tests established that some of the products were contaminated with what are known as super-warfarins – blood thinners that are most often given to people with heart problems that make them susceptible to blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes.
It was not immediately apparent, however, what to do to help the patients. It turns out it’s both easier and harder than anyone thought, Roberts and colleagues reported in Thursday’s issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Roberts and colleagues described a string of cases seen at Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria between March 28 and April 21 of this year.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Thursday, September 27th 2018 at 10:46AM
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