hey everyone it's sarah register nurse rn.com and in this video i'm going to go over the most common antidotes that you want to know as a nurse and this video is part of an nclex review series over pharmacology and as always whenever you get done watching this youtube video you can access the free quiz that will test you over these antidotes so let's get started what are antidotes well to help us understand that let's take this word apart the prefix anti means against and dots means to give so when we put all that together we get to give against so antidotes are substances that we can give to work against some like toxicities or overdose or poisoning that is occurring in the body now what we're covering in this video are the 14 most common antidotes you want to know for your exams and whenever you're working as a nurse it's always important like if you're going to be giving some heparin warfarin or digoxin you want to know in the back of your mind okay what is that antidote in case my patient experiences toxicity because you want to be able to go and grab that fast so first let's talk about digoxin so a patient can have what we call dig toxicity and i talked in depth about digoxin in another review so if a patient has this this is a cardiac glycoside what can we give to help reverse those effects well it's really easy to remember it's called digibinds so whenever you give that they'll reverse the effects then we have heparin heparin is an anticoagulant so it's a blood thinner now it's a fine balance between having a patient's blood too thin or too thick but if they are having heparin like toxicity where they have too much on board we can give the antidote protamine sulfate and that will help reverse that then we have warfarin and you may hear this referred to as coumadin this is also an anticoagulant so it thins the blood an antidote for this is vitamin k definitely i remember those two then we have benzodiazepines and these are very strong sedative drugs that are highly addictive a lot of their medication names end in pam pam or lamb lam such as diazepam and that's valium so if a patient takes too much of this they can have adverse effects and we can give flumazonil that's the antidote for those and then we have opioids opioids just like benzos are highly addictive they are painkillers and we're talking about drugs like morphine fentanyl etc and we can give what's called naloxone for an antidote for that and you've probably heard a lot about the opioid issues that we have here in the u.s and narcan that's another name for this we can give that to reverse the effects of opioids then we have acetaminophen and here in the u.s that is tylenol this is like a painkiller you can take over the counter so if a patient takes too much of this say they're trying to commit suicide overdose they we can give them what's called acetylcysteine and how i remember this antidote is that acetylcysteine has ace in it and so does acetaminophen so those two go together and that helps me remember that then we have beta blockers and these are cardiac medications and they end in lol like metoprol or atenolol and if a patient gets too much of that on board toxicity with that we can give them glucagon and how i remember that is that with beta blockers remember they mask hypoglycemia so glucagon like glucose that's how i keep those two straight then we have anticholinergic toxicity along with cholinergic toxicity so these two conditions are opposite of each other so first anti-cholinergic so with this this can be caused by like various medications that really affect those receptor sites and cause anti-cholinergic effects but we have too much occurring in the body so we're talking about like medications like antihistamines or atropine so if that happens we can give what's called physostigmine then on the flip side we have cholinergic toxicity and this can be caused by substances like organophosphates or carbamates these are substances that are typically found in insecticides pesticides and they can be used to poison people so to help reverse that we can give atropine then we have magnesium sulfate and we talked a lot about this drug in our ob lectures when we talked about pre-eclampsia so an antidote for that is calcium gluconate and if you plan on working in ob i would definitely remember that antidote for magnesium sulfate next is cyanide poisoning if a patient has this an antidote is hydroxyl cobalamin then we have ethylene glycol or methanol now ethylene glycol is found in like antifreeze and methanol is found in like windshield wiper fluids so you're probably thinking how would a person get too much of this well they could accidentally ingest it or intentionally ingest it like trying to commit suicide or maybe they were poison like ethylene glycol with the antifreeze if you have ever watched those like forensic shows there's a lot of cases where the person's being poisoned with antifreeze with this ethylene glycol so antidotes for these are faumepazole and then lastly we have lead toxicity and iron toxicity so lead toxicity too much lead in the body we can do what's called chelation therapy and this is a method where we can remove those heavy metals from the bloodstream so with lead we can give like an oral chelation medication called succimer or calcium disodium edita and that's via injection then with iron toxicity an antidote for that is defyroxamine and with differoxamine how i remember that is with iron what's atomic number for iron fe so with this antidote you have fe in it and that's how i remember it's antidote okay so that wraps up this review over the most common antidotes you want to know as a nurse and as always don't forget to check out that free quiz that will test you on these antidotes