I often see this referenced as a medical term but it always sounds like someone just witnessed a tragic event. What are the physical causes and effects?
In: Biology
There are two kinds of ‘shock.’
The first is based on blood flow. If your body is struggling to get blood around, it will start shutting things down to try and get enough blood to the right places. This can be caused by blood loss, a drop in blood pressure from something like sepsis, or even heatstroke.
The second is traumatic shock. This is the “witness a terrible event” shock. It’s a defense mechanism that tries to protect the brain. In an attempt to not stress over the situation, it shifts focus on different ways. This could be as simple as the denial of the event(“There’s no way that has happened”) all the way up to catatonia. As science doesn’t have a great idea of how exactly the brain works, there isn’t a great answer as to why exactly this happens.
Physical causes are usually from traumatic injuries like car crash impacts or anything that results in blood loss or affects your blood system.
Signs of shock are breathing irregularities, sweating, paleness, feeling cold and shaking.
Shock as a medical term is a sudden loss of blood flow. So your blood pressure drops, oxygen levels on the body/brain reduce and your heart rate picks up to try and compensate. Ultimately it will lead to unconsciousness and then death.
The sudden loss of blood flow can be from many things. Internal or external bleeding, such as trauma. So being hit by a car, or an artery or large vein being cut.
Internal organs can also rupture, either due to trauma or say an internal tumour rupturing.
Anaphylactic shock also causes shock, as fluid will come out of the blood and into your capillary beds. So plasma leaks out of your blood where it’s needed to help the blood flow, into your tissues. So you swell up like a balloon, rather than keeping all that lovely blood flowing in your system.
Severe full thickness burns also can do this, in a similar way to anaphylaxis. But plasma will leak out of the severe burns area.
There’s also heatstroke and dehydration. Both resulting in loss of fluids in the body, which in extreme cases causes loss of blood plasma volume.
That’s why people in shock are put on drips initially, to help raise the blood volume. Nasty thing shock!
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