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. Welcome to Helix Talk episode 92. I'm your co-host Dr. Kane. I'm

Dr. Schumann. And today's episode title is Why You Should Stop

Using Abnormal Saline, Normal Saline versus Lactated Ringers for IV fluids. And today we're

basically discussing some new evidence supporting the concept that maybe normal saline is, in fact,

nephrotoxic to patients. This is an IV solution that we've been using for many decades.

And it just so happens that relatively recently we have some data comparing normal saline versus another IV fluid called lactated ringers.

And that new data suggests that we should probably change our kind of standard practice away from normal saline.

Right. So, Dr. Kane, I practice mostly in an outpatient setting. So what are some

examples then of maybe when I, as an introduction, when are IV fluids generally used in a hospital?

I know a little bit from when I teach my nutrition lectures, but in kind of general practice,

what do you see them used for? Yeah, so basically there's like two main modalities of why a patient might receive IV fluids.

One is for maintenance IV fluid, meaning that the patient isn't taking adequate PO or can't take oral anything.

It could be that they have an ilias, they have surgery coming up, or they just had a surgery, they're nauseated, they're vomiting.

For whatever reason,

you're basically trying to maintain their hydration status, and you do that by giving maintenance

IV fluid. Now, the other thing that we do is IV boluses. So instead of kind of giving a continuous

rate over a long period of time of an IV fluid for someone who is hypotensive,

someone who's bleeding, someone who is extremely dehydrated that needs to kind of get a lot of

...