Why is it necessary to rinse eyes for 15 minutes after getting a chemical in? Wouldn’t 1 minute be enough?
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I think it’s also good to remember our sinuses and such connect with our eyes. So you’re ensuring you don’t just push whatever somewhere else, but flush that as well.
Idea is to minimize potential damage as much as possible, and yeah the literal eye is the obvious first and “most important” thing you think of in the moment, but it’s not the only thing at risk.
I got mould killer in my eye. I rinsed it for a few minutes then rang poisons information. They told me to get in the shower with my eyes open for 15 minutes then go to hospital. When I got to hospital the put litmus paper in my eye / the reading was still bad so the sat me over a sink with water running over my eye for another 20 mins.
Let me rephrase in a ELI5 way:
Why is it necessary to wipe until the paper is clean? Wouldn’t one wipe be enough?
As an optometrist the advice I was given was to irrigate the eye so much that you think you couldn’t possibly irrigate it anymore. Then irrigate it the same amount again. Chemical injuries are no joke.
Let’s find out. You pour a toxic chemical into your eyes, and we’ll ask a few other people to do the same thing. Each person will flush their eyes with water for a different length of time. Some will do it for what you suggest, 1 minute. Others will do it for 5 minutes. Others will rinse for 10 or 15 minutes. Who do you think has a better chance of going blind? That’s why.
1 minute to flush the chemicals out 14 minutes to regret your life choices
It’s just to make sure you flush ALL chemicals out to prevent further damage.
How much chemical is the right amount of chemical to have in your eye? If the answer is 0 the you probably want to over rinse rather than under rinse.
You’re trying to alter the molality of whatever is in your eyes. It’s not a matter of time so much as volume. After fifteen minutes, the water will have rinsed so much out that what remains is so dilute you’re basically doing homeopathy. If you could get several litres of water directly in your eyes instantly (volumetrically impossible), then an eye wash would take a couple seconds. But you can’t, so you use a constant application over a longer period of time.
Eye doctor here.
Chemical injuries to the eye are catastrophic.
Irrigating all the chemical out is paramount. It’s not just like washing it off the bench and it’s gone. The chemical starts to be in the tissue, burn the tissue, change the pH of the tissue.
So you need to irrigate until it’s normalised. Then the damage can be addressed.
It depends on the chemical and 15 minutes is not enough for proper chemical injuries. Do it at home for 15 minutes before going to the emergency department where they can continue the irrigation if needed.
The other day I gave orders that ended up being 4 gallons of saline gradually trickled into the eye to irrigate it. I believe it took 5 or 6 hours. But every hour the pH was checked and it was still abnormal. So more irrigation was done until it normalised.
The guy had splashed a solution which literally dissolves bone and skin into his eyes. And he escaped without serious injury because it was irritated properly.
Lab safety geek over here from a research background including working with zoonotic diseases, infectious diseases, and thus many dangerous chemicals too.
It’s not just your eyeball but the mucous membrane around it. Imagine these as a sponge that connect directly to your bloodstream. They are highly absorbent.
Now imagine a bright yellow sponge that has soaked up a dark food coloring or something (like your eye making contact with a dangerous chemical).
You can’t wring out or squeeze the sponge to help clean it faster (just like you can’t do this to your eyeball when you need to rinse it out). Instead, all you can do is run water over/through it until all the ink has flushed out.
Except with the sponge, worst case is it’s a little stained if you can’t rinse it all the way. With dangerous chemicals in your eye, even trace amounts of the chemical can cause not only permanent damage to your vision but, depending on the chemical, leech into your bloodstream and brain and cause other toxic, permanent damage elsewhere in your body/other organs.
Don’t rush something as vital as rinsing a dangerous chemical thoroughly out of your body.
ETA: don’t skimp on the eye protection. PPE is your last line of defense after other preventive measures like engineering and administrative controls. Use it wisely and you won’t ever have to rinse like your life depends on it 👌
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