MEK and Heptane in Healthcare

Methyl Ethyl Ketone and Heptane are both solvents that are used most often in industrial manufacturing and cleaning respectively.

Shared Applications

MEK and Heptane have several shared applications.

They are both found in adhesives, glues, paint coatings, and paint additives.

Medical Applications

Methyl Ethyl Ketone and Heptane also share another non-industrial application.

MEK and Heptane are both common ingredients in anesthetics used in most hospitals.

Anesthesia typically utilizes volatile compounds like MEK and Heptane that are strong enough to numb the body and induce temporary unconsciousness.

How It Works

Chemicals that act as anesthetics are meant to temporarily yield incapacitation and amnesia so that the patient both won’t feel the pain or discomfort of the procedure and will have little to no recollection of it.

The anesthetics that MEK and Heptane are a part of are typically in general anesthetics that amnesia and does not simply block pain signals like local anesthesia does.

General anesthesia works by targeting proteins in the membranes around nerve cells to numb pain receptors.

Inhaled anesthetics or general anesthetics affect different nerves than intravenous anesthetics, and inhaled anesthetics likely target nerves that commit pain to memory or send pain directly to the brain.

MEK is most likely utilized in anesthetics, because it is derived from ether. Ether helped to create the earliest forms of anesthesia.

The volatile liquids are inhaled in gaseous form through a machine that is able to measure an accurate dose for the patient to have a safe and pain-free surgery.

General anesthesia is most often used when surgery is being done on internal organs or other time-consuming and invasive procedures.

General anesthesia can be thought of as a medically induced coma, because essentially this is its function.

MEK and Heptane have many applications, but their role in anesthesia is the rare application that they share, and possibly the most important.

Other Applications

MEK and Heptane have many other useful applications.

MEK is used in the manufacturing of plastics, textiles and paraffin wax.

It is an industrial solvent that is also utilized to produce lacquer, lacquer thinners, paint remover, denatured alcohol, glues, and dry-erase markers.

Methyl Ethyl Ketone is commonly used as a cleaning agent.

MEK can also be found in powder coatings in the automobile and electronics industries.

Heptane is found in paint and coating additives, adhesives, sealants, chemical intermediates, outdoor stove fuel, rubber cement, and various inks.

Heptane can be utilized to extract oil from vegetables and is commonly found in gasoline.

Pure Heptane is not used for vegetable oil extraction, but rather a mixture of isomers that comprises commercial grade Heptane.

Heptane’s role in gasoline is due to the fact that it is derived from petroleum.

Heptane is also commonly used as a laboratory solvent and reagent.

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