shooting up in the palms? why?

[all4ofus]

I've had two patients admitted recently for I&Ds of the hand. Both were early 20s and shooting drugs into the palms of their hands. Both also had very pretty veins in their arms. Anyone know why they are using their palms instead of veins? This second one will be lucky if he gets to keep his finger. Gross.

[TheCommuter, BSN, RN]

one of my coworkers said they have a reason they do it in their palms and there's a name for it, but she didn't remember either the reason or the name, lol.

skin-popping, perhaps?

skin popping - wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[beckster_01, BSN, RN]

Wow.... Injecting in their eyelids? I'm surprised the thought of losing an eye never occurred to them...

[Gold_SJ]

--.-- Yeah that's what I thought, guess it shows how strong the pull of addiction is. I could only imagine if they got an abcess or something at the site...bleh. I hope for their sake that never happens.

[hiddencatRN, BSN, RN]

I had a patient once that had a nasty infection from IV drugs, surgeon said he tells all his patients with this particular problem that they should take the needle off and shoot the heroin (or drug of choice) into their orifice, he said it is so vascular that they get a pretty good high off it without getting those nasty infections. He said it was called anal bumping. Not exactly an answer to the question, but I thought it was interesting that the surgeon readily gave advise on alternative ways to shoot up.

Probably operating under a harm reduction philosophy, similarly to needle exchanges (drug users bring in used needles in exchange for clean ones to reduce disease spread). I used to be very supportive of this idea but....it's murkier for me now.

[tokmom, BSN, RN]

Our Docs call it skin popping, but if they have good veins it makes no sense unless they are trying to hide the fact like others have said.

Ouch on the eye lid, OMG! The only odd one I have seen is a woman shooting up around her pubic bone. Ended up with an I&D that took parts of her genitalia.