Hello, bed students.

My name is Zach Olson, and thank you for downloading this week's episode of the EM Clerkship Podcast.

This week, we are going to discuss a small, but kind of hard and painful topic that we frequently see in the emergency department.

Constipation.

And what I want you to remember today are the five ways that you can help somebody poop better.

As a med student, I always got lost in all of these constipation treatments, but it's actually quite

logical when you think your way through it and break it down into these five categories that

I'm going to give you.

And so that is what we're going to do today.

But before we do that, we need to cover some basics.

Before you treat constipation, this episode assumes that you've taken the time to consider why is the patient constipated?

Because there's a lot of reasons why people get constipated.

And some of them are bad.

The big five reasons are probably bad lifestyle.

So no water in their diet, no fiber, not exercising.

The next is medications, especially opiates.

Next is endocrine and electrolyte abnormalities.

After that is probably bowel obstructions like cancer, hernias, surgical adhesions,

and then rectal problems.

So painful fissures, stool impactions in the rectum, that type of thing.

So before you go prescribing anti-constipation medication, you have to evaluate for each of these.

So just real quickly, just an overview, how do we do this?

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