When you get a shot, like a flu or COVID vaccination for example, they typically put it in your upper arm or your thigh. Are they just sort of injecting it into the muscle? Or into a vein? Either way, where does it *go*?
I have seen videos of when people get things like local anesthetic where the skin starts to balloon out where they put the liquid. Does that sort of thing happen just deeper in the body? I know our body is mostly liquid but does it just absorb? Maybe redistributed ?
In: Biology
The other comments are correct about the eventual immune response to substances injected into your body, but I just wanted to touch on this one point: one of the main reasons why vaccines are intramuscular injections is simply ease of use. It’s a lot harder to get into a vein consistently, on every single person receiving a dose, than it is to get into the meaty part of a fairly large muscle. Phlebotomy is a particular skill that needs practice to do properly, and even then there are confounding factors (small veins, rubbery veins, rolling veins). Even the pros who draw blood from hundreds of sick, dehydrated people in a hospital won’t get it right on every attempt. Why bother expecting your pharmacist to master this skill and potentially mess up an intravenous injection when they could do something that’s faster, easier, and still works just as well?
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