Today was the second day of MedEx. To start the day I had to go to the Life Center in order to have blood drawn/ start the process of my health risk assessment. Afterwards, half of Tier I of MedEx went to get BLS (Basic Life Support) certified and the other half did research for their presentations. I started by getting BLS certified. I learned how to properly give compressions, resuscitate, and other crucial life saving skills. I was able to do a lot of my training with Harrison, a new friend that I met from Southside Christian school. Neither of us had ever been BLS certified, so we went through the process together. Then after lunch we split into our research groups to start working on our presentations. My group (pictured from left to right: Hampton, Tim, Mercedes, and Cynthia) was assigned to research on the opioid crisis. We decided to split up the work, and we each worked on researching our specific tasks/ then started to put together a visual presentation. My task was discovering the effects of the opioid crisis. To me this meant to look for physical and mental symptoms of opioid overdose, but this also meant to look for how it has changed our culture. I first delved into the symptoms where I learned that opioids are almost always paired with a laxative because they cause constipation. Secondly, I researched on how opioids adapt the mu-opioid receptors on the brain (MOR). MOR controls lots of important life functions like breathing, so if these are changed it can have devastating effects. I also got to look into why opioids are used: this is because they are very effective (but only for a short time after which one becomes tolerant). Opioids, as a whole, have very short half-lives, while other analgesics have longer half-lives. As a simple rule of thumb, longer half-lives means longer time to take effect but less change to brain chemistry. Finally, my research revealed how big drug companies don't want opioids to be regulated because they are highly profitable/ the opioid crisis has caused a lot of doctors and nurses to become "burnt out". Overall, another great day!
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