Dry Mouth & Dehydration

Video Transcript

"There are several different types of dehydration. There's hypernatremic or hyponatremic dehydration. There's dehydration that's induced by vomiting or various other causes. There's also dehydration based on lack of hydration. For instance, with heat stroke, with heat exhaustion and heat cramps, all of the above are indicators that an individual has not drank enough fluids, particularly water. The best way to prevent dehydration in itself is just to stay well hydrated. Drink a lot of water, especially during physical exertion and exercise, and do your best to try and rest every once in a while to allow your body time to recover from the physical exertion that it might or might not be experiencing at the time. As far as treatment for dehydration is very simple. It's basically intravenous fluids infused over a duration of time. Depending on whether it be hypo or hypernatremic dehydration depends on the fluid at hand that's chosen to rehydrate the patient itself. Symptoms of dehydration can include dizziness. It can also include dry, red skin, especially dry, red skin because it's the indicator that the body's stopped sweating. It's also an indicator that the patient might be close to experiencing a heat stroke or heat exhaustion. The patient might have an elevated temperature at that time -- an elevated core temp. Vomiting is also a possibility, or nausea, headache, muscle cramps, weakness, generalized weakness. And there's also a phenomena that they refer to as skin tinting, where you could...where you pinch an area of the skin and the turgor itself of the skin that's...your skin turgor is slow to respond to react back to its normal position."