Question About Poison Oak Treatment In Severe Exposures

[BigDon]

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?

[HenrikOlsen]

I believe the most common prescription treatment is one of the steroids, either injected or topical.

[Jens]

Yes, it would be something like prednisone. It's a powerful anti-inflammatory drug, so it works very well on poison oak. It's also used to prevent organ rejection, and to help asthma, for example.

[Nick Theodorakis]

I've done the prednisone oral regimen for sever poison ivy/oak before. It's not without potential side effects, so it's usually reserved for severe cases.

Nick

[BigDon]

Oh Lord, as soon as I saw the "P"-word I got chills.

Prednisone does NOT like me. An early part of the drug regimen I was on after that kidneystone blocked my uretur and my left renal pelvis blew up. (And, of course, I didn't even know I had one, much less two, until I blew my left one up.) With bacteremia!

Yep, I was having conversations with people who weren't there on that one. Docs take that as a worrisome sign BTW. They put their concerned faces on for that.

[Van Rijn]

Yeah, I don't like prednisone either. I was on prednisone long term, at varying doses up until about a decade ago. I got a lot of the classic side effects: I felt like I was starving constantly, I gained 60 pounds, moon face, fat everywhere, weakness (my legs would just give out without warning, one time I fell down stairs and cracked five ribs), and when I was on the higher doses, I couldn't think straight. There were some other things I won't go into. Luckily, I was able to get off that finally. I think it had some lasting effects, though . . .for instance, that's when my blood pressure went up, and it didn't go down much after I lost weight again.

Though, short term, it's usually not too bad . . .