ABSTRACT
In emergency trauma care, drug therapy often plays a less prominent role than in other emergencies, which are only occasionally part of a scenario involving traumatic injury. Emergency medical services (EMS) personnel certainly encounter nontraumatic emergencies, but they are not discussed in this chapter, in accordance with the focus of this book. Moreover, the generally futile attempts to resuscitate a patient in cardiac arrest after having sustained an injury do not merit a special description here of the drugs used in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. What remains is a consideration of the drugs used for the following conditions or purposes:
Shock (see Chap. 15) Anesthesia (see Chap. 13) Analgesia and sedation (discussed in this chapter) Antiemetics (discussed in this chapter) Cranial and spinal injuries (glucocorticoids discussed in this chapter; see also
Chap. 23) Burns and electrical injuries (see Chap. 29) Infections (discussed in this chapter)
In all cases, intravenous (IV) access (see Chap. 16) offers the ideal route for drug therapy. Some drugs initially may be injected intramuscularly (IM), either if no IV line is present or for the purpose of establishing an IV line (e.g., IM ketamine).
