How to treat a nosebleed

I'm Dr. Alan Greene and let's talk for a moment about nosebleeds and what to do about them. First, many parents panic a bit when they see a nosebleed in their child. Worried it may be something serious like leukemia. But in an otherwise healthy child without any other symptoms, nosebleeds are very common and generally not serious at all. It's usually caused by a little nick or drying out of blood vessels right in the surface of the nose. So what do you do about it? Do you tilt your head back? Do you apply ice to the nose?

Actually you treat it just like you would any other bleeding by applying direct pressure. And in the case of the nose the way you do it is pinch the nose shut like this, the sides against the middle, and hold it like that by the clock for 2 minutes. When you let go, often it will stop. If it's still bleeding, do that again but hold it for 5 minutes. Again, by the clock. It's a long time, the 5 minutes. But when you are done, almost all the time the nosebleed will be over with. If it's not, go ahead and give your doctor a call. They can give you some other instructions on what to do from there.

How to treat a nosebleed

BookmarkBookmark

Review Date: 7/1/2023

Reviewed By: Jesse Borke, MD, CPE, FAAEM, FACEP, Attending Physician at Kaiser Permanente, Orange County, CA. Also reviewed by David C. Dugdale, MD, Medical Director, Brenda Conaway, Editorial Director, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.

The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.

© 1997- A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.

All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.

Animations

Browse All

Illustrations

Browse All

Presentations

Browse All