Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions.

This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not

professional advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified

health care provider. And now on to the show.

Hey, Helixockeletters. Just a quick note, this is episode 46, which is a continuation of last

episode's self-care of gastrointestinal disorders. We split up the two episodes because it got

a little bit long. Last time we talked about heartburn and dyspepsia, and we'll go

ahead and go right into self-care of constipation. So moving on to constipation, again, thinking about who is not appropriate for self-care

is probably the first thing that you should be thinking about when patients approach you

with constipation.

And I can tell you from an ICU point of view, we see plenty of patients with bowel obstructions

and very severe gastrointestinal problems that would definitely never be appropriate

for self-care and oftentimes need surgery. So we have to be thinking about who should we be

recommending therapies to and who should we be turning away and referring them to, you know,

a physician or other health care provider. Again, I think and then also looking at some of the

limitations about, you know, looking

at non-pharmacotherapy is a perfectly appropriate thing to do here.

This is one I have to kind of be careful about mentioning to both my chlopine patients because

there's a fair amount of using the anesthetocotocin, then leading constipation, but then also

being careful how I say this to my warfarin patients.

So we think about things like drinking plenty of fluids,

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