My thread in Babbling about help with alkali burns reminded me of something I've been curious about for a long time.

When I was a greenhouseman some of my co-workers were tasked with clearing the brush from some of the more remote locations on the property and one of the crew was massively exposed to poison oak that he didn't recognized due to it being in the vine form, and him being from Chicago and not grown up around it.

We brought him into the emergency room looking like he had been napalmed. And they gave him a shot of something that cleard him up in what I thought was a spectacularly rapid amount of time.

Then in the thirty odd years since then I've seen two other people get the same treatment. A shot of something and they are nearly normal two days later, depending on how badly their skin was damaged prior to treatment.

Considering the week and a half to two weeks of misery I've seen my friends (and Mom!) go through after accidently trooping through the stuff and just relying on over the counter remedies, I have to ask:

What are the doctors giving these people?