Glove allergies advice needed

[whymeworrymed]

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I am a current MS1, and over the course of anatomy I realized that I have developed an allergy to nitrile gloves. I already have an allergy to latex gloves, so my only option now is hypoallergenic nitrile gloves. I have been providing them for myself during labs and when seeing patients, but this is tedious.

Over the past few weeks I have become increasingly stressed about what this will mean long-term for me. How big of a hurdle will this be for me in residency? It is a viable option for me to somehow carry around gloves at all times during residency? It may also be the case that I am allergic to sterile gloves, though I am not yet sure whether this is the case.

Does anyone have any experience with anything like this? Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Moose A Moose]

I feel like your future rotations/residency will work with you- it'd be some sort of medical discrimination if they didn't, right?

 

[PTPoeny]

I am allergic to polyisoprene gloves (the standard non-latex sterile glove). In medical school my student health department got me gloves that I wasn't allergic to and in residency after I went through employee health my program got me gloves. It was actually more challenging in residency than medical school because there was some negotiating over which clinical for would actually pay for them while my medical school just gave me some to take to rotations where I wasn't allowed to wear latex gloves and I wasn't involved in how they got paid for. My school provided them, not each rotation site.

Being allergic to nitrile gloves is going to be a much bigger pain compared to sterile gloves though because you wear them so much more often. You will basically always need to have them with you on most rotations and the non-sterile gloves don't come in handy packets to keep them clean in your pocket. I am not in a surgical field, so I don't use my sterile gloves every day and can generally predict which rotations will require them so it hasn't been a big deal for me.

Any chance you are finding yourself passionate about psych? That would be one field it would matter much less after training.

It has been a bit eye opening. If I were to end up at my hospital as a patient they don't stock any sterile gloves that I'm not allergic to other than the box in my locker and that is only in my size...