IVP Placebo

If there's one drug for blood pressure that any nurse worth her salt knows is crap, it's Labetelol.

Every fucking time someone (and usually, that "someone" is a resident or intern) orders that crap, I'm like, "Great. Now I'm going to spend more of my precious time "close monitoring" the patient for an IV push drug that's fucking completely useless."

I'm telling you now that shit doesn't work, I don't care what the studies show.

I'm also convinced that residents/interns order this crap because they, too, know it does nothing, and secretely, they're glad, because it means they don't have to manage shit side effects like hypotension or heart block.

The other Useless IVP Drug I've had to use is Hydralazine.

I'm convinced this is a drug that lazy community doctors who don't-want-to-be-paged use, so you they can say the nurse did something about the neuro patient's high blood pressure while they get in another round of golf before maybe answering a page.

I've pushed and pushed and pushed that crap on patients before, with nothing as a result. In fact, one time, I remember the blood pressure going up after a dose.

Then again, it was one of those situations (not at Current Hospital) in which I realized I might as well be using guided imagery to get the patient's blood pressure down if we didn't stop the bleed in the patient's head.

But, at a place where people mysteriously and routinely forgot to broadcast important things like the fact that half of their MRI machines were out of commission for a day or two, and no one was sure when they were going to be fixed, who cares about a random brain bleed, any hoo.