Hi everyone, Dr Bernard here. Essential oils can be very, powerful, just like this mother
son combo will find out. As always, references to subject matter with links to similar cases
published in literature in the description below. This is not an uncommon poisoning,
as I will demonstrate in this video, which is published in 8K. I make a new video every month so if you subscribe,
turn on all notifications and hit like we’ll get some gas station nachos together.
A Boy Accidentally Drank His Mom’s Essential Oils. This Is What Happened To His Brain.
BB is a 3 year old boy, presenting to the emergency room with nausea, vomiting, and
tachypnea. Tachy meaning fast and pnea referring to breath. He was breathing quick and struggling.
His mother Megan, tells the admitting nurse that she found her son on the floor
face down in a pool of his own stomach contents.
She turned him over to see his face, and she couldn’t believe what she saw.
18 months ago, Megan started having trouble with her arms
and her legs. Everyday, she would notice that her shoulders and hips would hurt. Her hands
would be swollen up and down her fingers to the point where just bending them would hurt.
Megan thought maybe she had developed arthritis. You know, body’s different after having kids now,
but this shouldn’t be a problem. Years ago, when she had just finished college, Megan had gotten
in to essential oils, just as a fun thing to do with some of her friends. She wanted
to live a more natural lifestyle and she loved the smell of things like lavender and tangerine.
In her mind, she connected the dots, arthritis and the oils. She remembered, that there’s some
oils that can be used topically for pain, to calm and cool down what she assumed was
inflammation happening in her body, attacking her joints and causing pain. She had some of
this wintergreen oil left over from years past. It’s the same stuff they have in other pain
relief creams that they sell over the counter. “Why not mix it with
some carrier oils and rub it on all the parts that hurt,” she thought. And everything seemed
to go great. Megan and her son were able to be happy and healthy because mom was pain free.
But a few months later, Megan’s arthritis came back and it would wax and wane.
The oils had child safety caps on top, where one has to push down with more concentrated
force than a child could know to exert. But because Megan’s hands would hurt so bad,
she elected to change the caps to ones without the safety. You could simply screw these ones
on and off, without the need to push down first. Megan knew the risk of doing this
was that her son could potentially get into the oils now, but it’s alright she thought,
just make sure to put them out of reach so he can’t get to them, and there will be no problem, she thought.
But there was a problem. One day Megan was making her wintergreen ointment sitting down
on a coffee table, she got a phone call from her boss. She stepped aside
as she left all her oils out on a table. Some ointment was already made,
and so she wasn’t totally aware of how much oil was left in each bottle when she walked away.
BB not knowing any better, got a hold of the oils as he started drinking. When she got back,
the bottles of her oils seemed toppled over, it was kind of messy. She didn’t remember if she had
knocked some over in the rush to pick up the call from her boss, so she didn’t think too much of it.
Over the next several hours, the oils settle and absorb in to BB’s body and his mother has
no idea what had happened. He starts to act lethargic, but his breathing becomes
fast and labored. He doesn’t act like how he normally does for that time of day,
as he empties his stomach on to the carpet. Megan finds him face down on the floor,
in a panic as she calls for 911 and he’s brought to the emergency room where we are now.
At examination, doctors notice BB had a fever, and his breathing was
fast and labored. When they listened to his lungs, they were clear, he didnt have a blocked airway,
so his tachypnea probably isn’t from some kind of congestion or fluid buildup in his lungs,
at least not yet. Because hes 3 years old, he can’t verbalize to anyone how he’s feeling.
No one knew he drank anything and he can’t tell anyone he did. And Megan hasn’t connected in her
mind yet that BB being this way is related to her essential oils being messy on that table.
A blood test finds that BB has low bicarbonate presence in blood, but what does that mean?
Bicarb is one part of baking soda, which is sodium bicarbonate. If you remember from middle or high
school, there was a small science experiment where you mix vinegar with baking soda to get a chemical
reaction because vinegar is an acid and baking soda is a base. So if BB has low bicarbonate,
then it means he has low base presence in blood. The body’s a balanced system, so if base is low,
and acid is opposite of base, then it mean he has too much acid. This is called acidosis.
Acid formally defined as the concentration of hydrogen ion, and -osis referring to a disorder.
An acid disorder, bringing us to the essential oils of his mother that he accidentally drank.
Some essential oils, probably won’t cause problems if you drink them.
But some of them are extreme extracts of things that are fine to put on the skin,
but the moment they get ingested and absorb into the body, they become poison.
Megan used wintergreen oil as an arthritis remedy, and that’s great. It does an awesome job at that
because the active ingredient contained therein, is methyl salicylate. The salicylate moiety you
might recognize from the chemical name of aspirin, acetyl salicylic acid. In the body, they become
the same salicylate, and this is one of the most common over the counter therapies. Even Pepto
Bismol is known as Bismuth sub salicylate. You can even find salicylate in face wash.
This makes sense with Megan’s use. Aspirin is an anti inflammatory medicine,
it’s how it relives pain. You could apply it on the skin where some of it gets absorbed,
or you can take tablets of it by mouth. The problem is wintergreen oil is really
concentrated. The bottle BB drank has the equivalent of at least 66
big aspirin tablets. Just 1/3 of this bottle alone can be fatal if taken by mouth in a child.
And BB drank 3 times that fatal dose, because he drank the entire bottle. Even though BB
can’t tell doctors what happened, their findings from examining him give them some more clues.
The interesting thing about the body is that it regulates acid base balance quickly through
breathing. We inhale oxygen. But we exhale CARBON dioxide. And this bring us back to biCARBONate.
The blood delivers oxygen all throughout the body, so what we breathe in,
goes from our lungs right in to our blood. But blood is made of water. And
if we’re trying to put oxygen in to it by inhaling, then it means at the same time,
carbon dioxide is in the blood ready to get exchanged out by exhaling.
The reason why this is important, is because when Carbon Dioxide is dissolved in Water,
it exists as a balanced system with biCARBONate and acid. This tells the
medical team a lot about what’s happening in BB. He has low bicarbonate in his blood,
meaning there’s more acid than base. Going backwards in the understanding of blood,
hes breathing fast meaning his body is desperately trying to push excess carbon dioxide out as a way
to fix the acidosis. But things keep getting worse. BB falls unconscious in the hospital
as he’s admitted in. As doctors take another blood test, they find that he now has acidemia.
It’s not just low base presence in blood now, but there’s an acid presence in blood,
meaning that it’s starting to spill all throughout his body. But where is this acid coming from?
This brings us back to BB’s fever. When energy is consumed,
heat is created. When the body consumes a lot more energy than it can create, then too much
heat gets generated, leading to hyperthermia, high body temperature, but why is this happening?
Inside the cells, there’s a powerhouse called the mitochondria. It generates energy in the
form of ATP, by using electricity, the movement of positive and negative charges, just like you see
on a battery. But when salicylate is inside the mitochondria, it flows freely going back and
forth wherever it wants, and starts to disturb the electrical flow. As this short circuit is formed,
ATP isn’t made anymore. But cells need that energy. They can detect that something is
wrong but they don’t know why. The powerhouse keeps working harder and harder kind of like
a hamster running in a wheel and because the wheel doesn’t touch the ground, the hamster
can run forever and not get anywhere. Salicylate toxicity forces the mitochondria to run in place,
never actually producing any energy. As the wheels keep spinning faster and harder, massive
amounts of heat are released and because energy is only consumed and not made in BB’s body anymore,
this is one part of where his carbon dioxide and acidosis are coming from.
The tachypnea, the metabolic acidosis, the nausea and vomiting before falling unconscious.
Doctors ask Megan if her son had accidentally eaten something or drank some kind of chemical,
specifically something related to aspirin.
Already in a panic, she said she didnt know, she didnt think he did, but then it dawned on her.
She left her essential oils out when she stepped aside to talk to her boss on the phone.
The bottles didnt have child safety caps. She came back to them and saw a big mess that she
didnt remember leaving. As she tells doctors every single oil that BB could have drank,
their blood test returns, and it confirms everything, because he has high salicylate
presence in blood from drinking a bottle bottle of wintergreen oil, made of methyl salicylate.
Finding the problem is great for the doctors, but things are only getting worse now. BB’s acidemia
is intensifying. More acid has spilled into his blood compared to just a couple hours before,
and because he’s unconscious now, it means that his brain is now affected,
but how did the brain get involved??
We’ve already established that cells need a lot of energy to function, but in toxic settings,
huge amounts of salicylate forces cells to use more energy than they can create.
One function of cells is to maintain their fluid balance. A cell doesnt want to be super bloated,
it also doesnt want to be shriveled up. To maintain the balance of fluid,
cells can’t just pull water from the outside and shove it in.
But what they can do is manipulate sodium, because wherever sodium is, water will flow towards it.
In this small science experiment, I dissolve salt in this water and place it into a semi
permeable tube meaning that only water and nothing else can flow in and out of it.
I place this tube in a pool of distilled water that has no salt dissolved in it and
you’ll see that water enters the tube. That water flows towards where there’s sodium.
If cells can pump sodium in and out, they can control their fluid balance.
This pumping of electrolytes requires energy, which if the cells aren’t making anymore and they’re
starting to run out of it, then it means that they can’t control their own fluid balance.
Sodium doesnt get pumped out of the cell anymore. Water flows in
and the cells become bloated. When all the cells become bloated, the organ becomes bloated.
The brain starts to swell up and expand into the skull. But this is only the start of the problem.
The thing about salicylate as a chemical is that it exists as a second form, in a balance
with itself as salicylic acid. Salicylate has an electrical property associated with it,
a negative charge. The reason this is important, is because when a chemical has a charge,
it cannot enter or exit a cell by itself. But salicylic acid isn’t charged. Salicylic acid,
enters and exits cells however and whenever it wants to. And because BB has acidemia,
a high hydrogen ion presence in blood, it means that there’s so much hydrogen floating around,
salicylate only exists as salicylic acid, as it now starts to flood in to every single organ.
The brain’s not only swelling now because it doesnt have enough energy to maintain fluid
balance, but it starts discharging. The heart starts beating in strange rhythms because muscle
needs a lot of energy, but as salicylic acid disturbs all ATP production,
the cells can’t keep up. Fluid starts flowing in to the lungs because those cells don’t
have enough energy to maintain fluid balance. BB’s body tried the best it could to breathe
out extra carbon dioxide and push out the acid in his blood to protect his organs from this,
but the flood of wintergreen oil he drank simply overwhelmed this mechanism.
Is there anything the medical team can do at this point to reverse this? By the time they asked
Megan if BB had accidentally eaten something or drank some kind of chemical, they started to take
measures for what they thought could be happening. If he has acidemia and acidosis, specifically has
low bicarbonate presence in blood, then the answer is to give him bicarbonate. This will push the
balance of acid down. As more base is infused in to his blood, it prevents salicylate from becoming
salicylic acid, forcing it to keep its electrical charge so it can’t enter in to his organs.
Additional measures were taken by doctors to force base in to BB’s urine. This allows the body to use
the kidneys to filter and concentrate salicylate so that it can be eliminated in the urine.
There isn’t much that can be done once most salicylate becomes salicylic acid in the body
during a toxic event because there isn’t an easy way to suck it out of the organs. In some cases,
patients will appear to be ok and within a couple hours, the aspirin toxicity will overtake them,
permanently. The clinical decline can happen quickly and suddenly in this setting.
The only thing we can do now is to make the blood basic as quickly as possible to prevent all of
that from happening. And luckily the medical team were able to catch it just in time in BB’s case.
After several days in the hospital, and a lesson learned by Megan to take
great caution in never exposing any risk ever with any potential
household danger to her son, BB was able to make a full recovery.
Thanks so much for watching. Take care of yourself. And Be Well.