dr-exmedic.com

It turns out that, in addition to the national poison control center number (800-222-1222), there is a National Button Battery Ingestion Hotline.  I knew that swallowing a button battery can be bad; I didn’t think it warranted its own number.  Fun factoids:

• Nearly 25% of batteries are swallowed because they are mistaken for medicines or pills.
• Adults and older children often think of the mouth as a “third hand”, holding the battery there while working.

I guess that means that many of these ingestions are Darwinian in nature…pretty much everyone but the little kids.

Filed under: Emergency Medicine