Ipecac-induced emesis and gastric lavage are equally unpleasant

It has been widely held that gastric lavage is more unpleasant than ipecac-induced emesis. In fact, patients are occasionally threatened with large rubber tubes in order to persuade them to drink ipecac. To confirm that this assumption exists, we asked 41 emergency physicians and nurses who had never personally undergone either procedure to estimate the discomfort of each using a 10 cm unsegmented visual analog scale. This "naive" group thought that gastric lavage would be significantly more unpleasant than ipecac-induced emesis (mean scores: lavage = 6.46, emesis = 4.94; P less than .001, paired t-test). Using the same methods, we asked 16 health professionals who had undergone both procedures as part of another study to score the recalled unpleasantness of each procedure. Among these who had actually experienced both, there was no significant difference between the mean scores for lavage (4.09) and emesis (4.62) (P greater than 0.5, paired t-test). The mean score difference (lavage minus emesis) for the "naive" group was significantly greater than for the experimental group (1.52 vs -.53, P less than .001, unpaired t-test). Among normal volunteers, ipecac-induced emesis and gastric lavage are equally unpleasant gastric emptying procedures.