When you donate blood the needle goes into a large, visible vein in your arm or hand but when getting a shot the needle just goes somewhere in your arm.
In: Biology
OH YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT **INJECTIONS.**
~~Well when you get shot in the arm, the bullet can fragment into little tiny pieces but since your blood vessels will be damaged, it’s highly unlikely the fragments can travel through them.~~
Nurse here, normally when you get a shot in the arm, you don’t want the contents to be released directly into the blood vessel. Normally we inject into your arm muscle tissue and retract the plunger, looking for blood return. There shouldn’t be any blood return since muscle tissue isn’t saturated with free flowing blood. Otherwise, if you do want contents to be released into the blood stream directly then you go for the veins.
There are a lot of drugs that can go multiple routes to get in your body (into a vein, into a muscle, into fat, oral, sublingual, etc). There are also a lot of drugs that have to go a specific route because of how the body breaks them down or the effect they can have if they are particularly harsh.
Like you give insulin into fatty tissue because of how the body can use it. You can also give insulin straight into a vein during emergency situations because it works faster that way.
You can give certain nausea medicine (phenergan) into a big vein and into the muscle, but you can’t give in fat because it is too harsh and will tear up your fatty tissue.
Vaccines are designed to go into muscle. But typically the muscles we use for vaccines aren’t particularly vein-y. If you were to accidentally give a vaccine in a vein, it would likely be okay, it just might mess with the effectiveness of the vaccine.
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