I mean, isn’t oxygen good fit your body?
In: Biology
Hi! I use to work as an EMT/FIRE. ^_^ When you inhale, you take in oxygen. While exhaling you breathe out carbon dioxide. Hyperventilating is bad because breathing rapidly makes it so you exhale more than you inhale. Your body needs balance. Too little carbon dioxide in your body & your blood vessels constrict, causing lightheartedness & rapid heart rate as your body tries to compensate. Some people even pass out. Meanwhile, too much carbon dioxide in your body & it will knock out your hypoxic drive, causing you to stop breathing altogether.
I would never reccomend breathing into a paper bag to treat hyperventilating patients. It’s not harmful, it just doesn’t actually do anything. What we do is explain we’re going to count backwards from 100 & that we want them to match their breathing to our pace. We start a a rapid pace, because they’re currently dialed to 11. Then we gradually slow it down until we can get them to a normal rate. I’ve never seen it fail.
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