Fluid Balance Is Important: Keep Yourself Hydrated!

Fluid imbalance is one of the easiest ways to compromise your health without realising the damage you’re doing.

We are constantly told to make sure that we drink plenty of water each day – the recommended amount of daily fluid intake is around 1.2 litres, or 6-8 glasses of water. Tea, coffee and juice also count towards this daily total.

Ignored Advice

Despite this advice being regularly thrust upon us, altogether too few people actually manage to follow it.

Many people simply tend not to drink water throughout the day, or drink the recommended amount of the wrong thing.

Fizzy drinks are replacing water and healthy fruit juices in our daily lives, and these sugary carbonated drinks are actually detrimental to your body’s healthy fluid levels.

Fizzy Drinks Don’t Help

Fizzy drinks actually have diuretic properties, meaning that they force vital fluids out of the body.

So the whole time you’ve been swigging cola, thinking that you’ve been replenishing your body’s fluid levels, you’ve actually been dehydrating yourself.

The flip side of this situation is the number of people who overcompensate with regard to their fluid intake. Drinking too much water can be just as damaging as not drinking enough.

Either scenario can lead to very serious health defects, which is why fluid balance is measured so rigorously in hospitals, using a fluid balance chart.

Effects Of Not Drinking Enough

Fluid deficiency can cause a condition known as hypovalemia.

Missing a couple of glasses of water a day is unlikely to cause this condition – it is much more likely that it will be brought on by an illness which causes excessive bleeding, vomiting or urination.

Hypovalemia can be detected by a lower overall blood pressure and a weaker pulse, and patients may also exhibit shallow or rapid breathing.

Urine output will be drastically reduced, as the body simply has nothing left to give, and skin will be cracked and papery.

If hypovalemia is allowed to progress, thick, sticky saliva and sunken eyes can denote the urgent requirement for rehydration.

Effects Of Drinking Too Much

The flip side of this is hypervalemia – a concentration of too much fluid within the body.

Swollen limbs (caused by water retention) and raised blood pressure can both alert a patient to the fact that they may be experiencing hypervalemia.

A body with too much fluid in it will also display rapid pulse rates, moist or frothy coughing, and heart abnormalities.

Both hypo- and hypervalemia can lead to extremely serious (and potentially life-threatening) conditions.

Should you ever have cause for a hospital stay of any length of time, you will undoubtedly see your nursing staff keeping a careful watch on your body fluid levels.

Your fluid balance chart is one of the most important tools that doctors and nurses have in the fight to keep you healthy.