Hi everyone, Doctor Bernard here.
This is a case that happened in the United States, de-identified for the patient, but
her story of how she got to where she did, may not be too unfamiliar.
As always, references to subject matter with links to similar cases published in literature
in the description below.
I make a new video every month so if you subscribe and hit like we’ll get some gas station
sushi together.
A Woman Drank 35% Hydrogen Peroxide At Lunchtime.
This Is What Happened To Her Brain.
KJ is a 40 year old woman, presenting to the emergency room, with her eyes wide open, but
she was completely unresponsive.
She was foaming at the mouth.
You see, KJ could never remember a time in her life, when she was healthy.
When she was young, she had an eating disorder that would periodically put her in the hospital.
Oftentimes doctors would document she had an acute onset psychosis with delusions and
hallucinations because of hypoglycemia.
Hypo meaning low.
Glyc from Greek referring to glucose or sugar and emia meaning presence in blood.
Her erratic eating habits caused hypoglycemia, which can cause changes in one’s mental
status resulting in hallucinations, delusions and acute onset psychosis.
Skin deep, this could have been the cause of all her problems, but there was a lot more
going on.
KJ eventually got the help she needed for her eating disorder, but she never really
seemed to get healthier.
She was always sick with a cold or the flu.
Sometimes she’d have a headache and couldn’t go to school because of it.
She was always exhausted, she’d get a rash on her face if she was out in the sun for
too long, and she’d have body aches and chills before eventually, acute onset psychosis
would bring her back to the hospital.
To KJ, these were serious issues, but to everyone else, she was being a drama queen.
You have a headache?
Well you sleep too late at night her mom would say.
You have a rash on your face after being in the sun?
What a big surprise, that’s called sunburn, sweety, mom would say.
At doctors visits, her mom would often interject when the doctor asked a question.
Mom downplayed all of KJ’s signs and symptoms giving doctors the impression that things
weren’t as severe as KJ described.
And sometimes, Mom would just refuse to bring KJ to the hospital, locking KJ in her room,
telling her to figure it all out herself.
As an adult, KJ couldn’t understand why she felt so awful all the time, but she just
accepted it as fact.
Maybe she did feel fine, that it was all in her head, so maybe she should just keep quiet,
she thought.
In the hospital for an acute onset psychosis at the age of 24, doctors put KJ on antipsychotic
medicines, but she didn’t need antipsychotic medicines.
When she was ready to go home, the nurse involved in her care wrote a name and a phone number
on a card and urged KJ to call it and schedule an appointment.
Not wanting to step on doctors’ toes, the nurse suspected KJ had autoimmune disease,
where the immune system attacks the body.
The nurse brought it up on psychiatric rounds, the blood tests were borderline, the signs
and symptoms were nonspecific meaning they could have been a variety of different things,
but everything was shrugged off.
At the rheumatology doctor’s office, KJ was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus,
also known as Lupus.
This made sense with all of her problems, the rash on her face, the flare ups, always
getting sick, the muscle aches and pains, and the acute onset psychosis.
Lupus is a time when the immune system is actively attacking the body and having the
diagnosis finally brought KJ to peace, her health problems weren’t in her mind, her
mom was wrong, she wasn’t being a drama queen and doctors were overlooking this and
they didn’t have KJ’s health in their best interests, she thought.
She took medicines for this lupus, and everything was OK
But a few years later, things started to get worse again.
KJ had swelling in her hands and feet, she had trouble with her shoulders and hips as
doctors determined her immune system had been attacking them to the point of rheumatoid
arthritis, where the immune system starts attacking the bones and the joints causing
permanent damage.
This new disease would mean that she would have to take more medicines, and even then,
there’s no guarantee that she won’t need things like a hip replacement later in life
given how aggressively her immune system had been attacking her joints.
But KJ had had enough.
She had been taking all these medicines for her lupus for all these years, and she didn't
get any better, she ended up developing even more disease she thought.
And now with this arthritis, doctors wanted her to take this cocktail of medicines that
she couldn’t even afford.
If they had only taken her more seriously when she was younger, maybe all of this could
have been prevented, she thought as she went online and tried to find her own therapies.
A while back, someone had recommended to KJ about these alternative therapies for her
lupus.
At first, it was smelling some oils, and she didn’t really feel much better, maybe a
little.
But as she dived deeper into this space, she came across hydrogen peroxide therapy.
The communities online were adamant, hydrogen peroxide is basically water, with an extra
oxygen.
You’re not just having a glass of H2O, you gonna be chugging a glass of H2O2.
And without a doubt, that oxygen is totally what KJ’s body needed, because
when extra oxygen is present, bad things can’t happen to your cells.
And you know, the immune system attacking your body is just bad things happening to
your cells, so definitely to fix KJ’s body she needed this oxygen.
KJ was skeptical at first because she knew these alternative therapies could be suspect.
Maybe something was there but nothing was standard.
None of the communities agreed on a route of administration for this, because truth
is you really shouldn’t be putting this in your body.
Some sources said to infuse it directly in to the blood, but KJ wasn’t going to do
that.
Some sources said do not take by mouth but others said it was fine so long as it was
diluted.
In the end, KJ decided that she would start by diluting some and rubbing it on her skin
so that the oxygen will absorb right into her body.
And after a few weeks as she got more comfortable, she would start diluting the hydrogen peroxide
to drink.
And this is what she did.
KJ would purchase 35% “food grade” hydrogen peroxide bottles from big box retail stores.
She read online that refrigerating the 35% peroxide would help stabilize it chemically,
so she’d put it in her fridge right alongside her food.
It was “food grade” anyways, so no problem here, she thought.
One day, KJ transferred the 35% hydrogen peroxide into clear gallon water jugs.
She only drank distilled water now because tap water had impurities that she believed,
made her lupus worse.
She didnt know why when she bought the hydrogen peroxide from the store it came in an opaque
bottle.
She made her own inference that the peroxide needed to absorb the energy and positive vibes
from around it so that when it was in her body, it would just cure her of all the autoimmunity
that plagued her organs and joints.
35% hydrogen peroxide is dangerous.
If left on the skin, it can be corrosive because it reacts and does in fact, release a bunch
of oxygen.
KJ made an effort to make sure she marked the water bottles as hydrogen peroxide, but
this time, she was distracted and forgot, and put them back into the fridge without
marking them.
One day at lunchtime, KJ was thirsty and needed to drink some water.
She reached in for a bottle and poured herself a cup, and this time for real, she was drinking
H2O2, 35%.
Immediately after taking a couple sips of the concentrated hydrogen peroxide solution,
she could feel it fizz and bubble on the way down.
At first she was panicked and didn't know what was happening because she could feel
air just blow right out of her nose, but then she realized she drank the concentrated solution.
She had been meaning to increase the concentration anyways so that she could optimize the amount
of oxygen in her body.
And this was the last thing she would remember as she collapsed to the floor and started
emptying her stomach.
People who were staying with her came to see the commotion as KJ became completely unresponsive
even though her eyes were wide open as she was foaming at the mouth and they call for
911 and she’s brought to the emergency room where we are now.
At examination, doctors find that KJ’s blood pressure was high and she had a decreased
level of consciousness.
No one knew she drank 35% hydrogen peroxide, although they suspected she might have consumed
something because she was foaming at the mouth.
What doctors did know for sure, was that KJ only had reflexes on one side of her body.
This is called hemiplegia, hemi meaning half and plegia referring to paralysis.
KJ was paralyzed on one side of her body, meaning something could be wrong with her
brain, giving doctors some clues as to what’s happening.
A scan of KJ’s brain, revealed that parts of it were ischemic.
Isch- derived from Greek meaning a holding back of and -emia meaning presence of blood.
So parts of KJ’s brain weren’t getting enough blood flow and therefore not getting
enough oxygen which could explain why she’s paralyzed on one side of her body, but how
would something like this happen with hydrogen peroxide?
It’s supposed to hyperoxygenate parts of the body, right?
That’s what they say, but what’s happening to KJ is a result of too much oxygen present,
and so much, that it’s blocking blood flow in her brain.
You see, when hydrogen peroxide comes in contact with human tissue, it reacts.
The reason why chemicals react is so that they can become more stable, meaning hydrogen
peroxide when it’s concentrated like 35%, can be a little unstable.
It breaks down to water, that’s stable, and oxygen, also stable, but when it does
this, it releases a lot of heat.
In almost all known living beings, cells have metabolic activity, so they’re creating
and using energy to function.
A consequence of this activity is the production of some hydrogen peroxide.
We’ve already established that it can be unstable, and so cells want to stabilize Hydrogen
Peroxide by promoting its breakdown to, water and oxygen, and cells have the machinery to
do this through an enzyme, a protein, known as catalase.
Cells generally have an idea of how much hydrogen peroxide will be in their environment as a
result of their metabolism, because they’re adapted to it.
That’s normal to them.
They don’t have an idea of when 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide is going to be ingested.
As KJ drank it, the huge influx of hydrogen peroxide reacted in her cells.
And because a lot of heat is released when that happens, those cells get burned and the
tissue becomes injured.
Doctors noticed caustic burns in her mouth and throat when the foaming started to subside.
When you consume something by mouth, it goes into your stomach, in to your intestines and
then absorbs into your liver where it goes into your blood stream.
Some of the bubbles will absorb in, but hydrogen peroxide also keeps reacting as it goes down,
causing those gas bubbles to get in to the liver before it gets in the blood.
But, blood contains hemoglobin, which is a protein that has something called Heme, an
iron containing compound, which is how blood delivers oxygen to the rest of the body.
And this kind of iron also happens to encourage hydrogen peroxide to breakdown to water and
oxygen.
Typically, you want to have water and oxygen in the blood, because that’s what it’s
made of, but the problem is the amount.
1 milliliter of 35% hydrogen peroxide liberates 100 milliliters of oxygen.
So just 5 milliliters of 35% hydrogen peroxide liberates an entire breath’s volume worth of oxygen.
Imagine an air bubble that large floating around your body.
The blood can only have so much oxygen in it before it can’t have anymore.
It’s kind of like how water can only have so much salt dissolved in it.
Or coffee can only have so much sugar in it.
Then the bubbles start to form in the blood, blocking flow.
When this gets to the brain, blood cant flow through anymore, meaning even if KJ had “hyper
oxygenated” her body with hydrogen peroxide, she’s actually blocked blood flow with oxygen
bubbles, causing ischemia, a holding back of the presence of blood, leading to permanent
brain damage.
Is there anything doctors can do to reverse this?
Maybe.
This brings us to a concept called solubility.
Salt dissolving in water is a solid dissolving in a liquid.
But oxygen dissolving in blood is a gas dissolving in a liquid.
Gases have a lot of particles which are moving around and have a lot space in between.
When pressure is increased, the average space between gas particles decreases and the particles
come in to contact with the liquid more often, helping to increase the amount of gas that
can dissolve in liquid.
If KJ’s blood can’t hold anymore oxygen because hydrogen peroxide has liberated huge
amounts of oxygen in, then one solution would be to put her in a high pressure chamber to
force more oxygen in to her blood.
We would just need enough to break up the blockage in her brain to get more blood flowing
though.
This hyperbaric oxygen therapy isn’t available at all hospitals, but luckily for KJ, the
one she was at did have it, as she was sent in.
The US Poison Centers have logged these accidental hydrogen peroxide ingestion cases, it’s
been reported hundreds of times over the last 10 years, so that’s a minimum of how many
times this has happened, because sometimes it doesnt get reported, or a patient can be
admitted into the hospital and no one would have ever known about the case being related
to hydrogen peroxide ingestion.
And just a quick commentary on the folks selling hydrogen peroxide as medicine.
At 35% concentration, it’s considered a hazardous material to ship, hazmat, but yet
food grade is on the label making people think it’s no big deal.
Other times online, within the same item title, they call it both 35% and 7.99% together.
It can only be one of these, so not sure how they’re justifying it as 35%.
And as for hydrogen peroxide use, you might remember a time when it was used to clean
cuts and wounds.
Since maybe mid 2000’s, hydrogen peroxide is not commonly recommended for that irrigation
as it appears it really doesnt do that much against bacteria that might get in the wound,
and in some cases, hydrogen peroxide might impede wound healing, and in 1 reported case,
it led to gas bubbles blocking blood flow in the hospital in a patient, bringing us
back to KJ.
After hyperbaric oxygen therapy, her brain no longer had signs of ischemia.
Doctors treated the caustic injury to her throat and esophagus.
After more than a week in the hospital, KJ was sent to a rehabilitation center to try
and regain the function she lost during this brain injury, as she was able to make a recovery.
I understand when people have grievances with the health system, but turning to this dark
side not only didn't help KJ’s autoimmune disease, it caused other major issues that
could have been prevented.
Thanks so much for watching.
Take care of yourself.
And be well.