For example if I have thin blood and cut my arm badly. How would a doctor be able stop the bleeding?
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Platelets are used along with other anticoagulation reversal medication. Transfusions can be whole blood, or plasma, or platelets.
The doctor will give the patient an antidote to the blood thinner.
Vitamin K is the antidote to blood thinners like Wafarin (coumarin). A large dose of Vitamin K will help to temporarily restore the blood’s naturally coagulating properties.
Other blood thinners have other antidotes. The antidote to Xarelto (rivaroxaban) is Andexanet. The antidote to Pradaxa (apixaban) is Idarucizumab.
The patient may also be given a transfusion of platelets.
Bleeding can be stopped with a variety of things but some blood thinners can not be turned off.
Heparin is a commonly used blood thinner, it can be counteracted with a medication called protamine.
Colloidal silver can be used it burns like hell but can stop some smallish bleeding. The internet claims all sorts of other uses, do not believe them.
A person can be infused with whole blood or platelets to stop bleeding.
Some blood thinners can result in death.
Biomedical Scientist specialised in haematology here!
A lot of what others have said here are right – just thought I’d add to it.
In the UK patients taking blood thinners such as Warfarin or Heparin are monitored weekly. They will have there bloods taken weekly for INR and dosing.
A normal INR is between 1.0 and 1.5. A result lower than this will mean the blood is not thin enough and higher than this means there’s a risk of clotting.
All patients on blood thinners keep one-to-one contact which a anti-coagulation nurse. The nurse will call them when there dosage of warfarin needs to change, and equally the patient will contact the nurse should they feel they have any problems.
The example of your arm bleeding isn’t a totally accurate example of what would happen due to bleeding from blood thinners. It wouldn’t be at the point of a cut that you would find out you had a clotting issue from blood thinners.
Generally if there is a problem with clotting factors due to a too high dose of warfarin – you’d be most likely to expect an extremely large, purple bruising across the abdomen area, hense why you won’t really gain a cut and continually bleed from it as you’d already be internally bleeding.
In your example; a cut that wont stop bleeding or bled for along time would be more accurate as someone suffering from Haemophilia which is caused by a deficiency in clotting factors VIII. The patient would also bruise easily in this case.
Back to answer the blood which is too thin – if a patient is on blood thinners and there INR was below 1, the coagulation nurse would call them to change their warfarin dosage to try and bring the INR back up to around 1-1.5. If the low INR is deemed dangerous based on a patients background, health and history – if they aren’t already in the hospital they would be asked to again the clinic for treatment which may include vitamin K injections, platelet transfusion and/or cryoprecipitate
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