In the 1920’s Arm and Hammer began printing and distributing the booklet ‘A Friend in Need’ – Facts worth knowing about Baking Soda as a proven medicinal agent‘ to millions of homes in North America and round the world. In 1947, Dr. Walter Bastedo wrote that Sodium Bicarbonate is ‘perhaps the most employed of all medicines …’. in his Practical Textbook for Physicians. Today the PubChem database lists an enormous variety of uses for this ‘Green Safer’ universal product. Dr Josh Farkas teaches of the value of bicarbonate in ER resuscitations.
Walter Bastedo MD, Sc D, professor in Pharmacology and Medicine and ten-year president of US Pharmacopoeia Convention, adapted decades of his course lectures to write his textbook. Materia Medica, Pharmacology Therapeutics and Prescription Writing, 1947, was his fifth edition. In this work, under sodium bicarbonate, he states this, perhaps the most employed of all medicines …’. (p 117)
PubChem
PubChem the open chemistry database at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland provides key chemical information for scientists, students, and the general public. Contributed by hundreds of data sources – government agencies, chemical vendors, journal publishers, and more. It is the source of the following data.
Medicine:
Sodium Bicarbonate is used in the treatment of FORTY-SIX diseases… from Acid-Base Imbalance to Ventricular Dysfunction. It is commonly available in ER’s for emergency resuscitation.
Therapeutic Uses:
for the treatment of metabolic acidosis which may occur in severe renal disease, uncontrolled diabetes, circulatory insufficiency due to shock or severe dehydration, extracorporeal circulation of blood, cardiac arrest and severe primary lactic acidosis. Also is indicated in severe diarrhoea which is often accompanied by a significant loss of bicarbonate. Further indicated in the treatment of certain drug intoxications, including barbiturates (where dissociation of the barbiturate protein complex is desired), in poisoning by salicylates or methyl alcohol and in hemolytic reactions requiring alkalinization of the urine to diminish nephrotoxicity of blood pigments.
Pharamacology:
Intravenous sodium bicarbonate therapy increases plasma bicarbonate, buffers excess hydrogen ion concentration, raises blood pH and reverses the clinical manifestations of acidosis.
ER Resuscitation
Dr Josh Farkas, Assistant Professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Vermont, discusses case appropriate solutions using pH to guide the intravenous medium.
Farkas states that very commonly ER patients have acidosis (blood pH is too low) in which case a bicarbonate IV is recommended to help restore blood pH to normal levels. He states that very, very rarely, he sees an ER patient with alkalosis (blood with pH that is too high.
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