Can someone be instilled with medication?

Question

I am looking specifically for how to use the first definition given here:

to cause to enter drop by drop (instill medication into the infected eye)

but I imagine usage rules would apply equally to the the sense of instilling a sense of something in someone.

I can't work out if "patients were instilled with medication" would be incorrect, or if it is just an alternative construction of "medication was instilled into patients".

My Google search results are dominated by usage pertaining to instilling a sense of something in someone or variants of "All patients instilled a tear substitute in 1 eye", which doesn't in itself suggest anything about whether the form in question is incorrect.

So can someone be instilled with medication, or is medication always instilled by or into someone?

Answer 1

Instillation.

A procedure in which a fluid is slowly introduced into a cavity or passage of the body and allowed to remain for a specific length of time before being drained or withdrawn.

Mosby's Medical Dictionary, 8th edition. © 2009, Elsevier.

Bladder instillation is a therapy for urinary bladder cancer. The chemotherapeutic solution is instilled into the bladder throug a catheter.

Ear instillation is the instillation of a medicated solution into the external auditory canal of the ear.

Eye instillation is the dispensation of a steril ophthalmic medication into a patient's eye.

So, technically speaking, fluids are instilled (poured drop by drop) into body parts.

I did a Google search for "patients were instilled" and got some results, but interestingly many or most of them were medical papers written by researchers from non-English-speaking countries. I randomly checked out ten papers and their authors were from Brasil, Italy, Korea, Netherlands, Turkey, Japan, Japan again and India; two papers were from American authors.

Out of the medical field, "values were instilled" gets 849000 results in a Google search but "boys were instilled" gets only very few.

Judging by this results, solutions and values are often instilled, but patients and boys are not.

Though it's extremely rare to write that "whole patients" or people in general are instilled, experimental animals (or at least rats) are treated differently, because "rats were instilled" is a common phrase that got 765000 results in a Google search.

Answer 2

I don't have any problem with the dictionary's example usage of instill, but I can't see why that should lead OP to ask whether we can reasonably say "patients were instilled with medication".

The short answer is we never say that. It's quite reasonable to speak of wounds (or other [infected body parts]) being thus treated (see these written instances of instilled with saline), but not the whole patient.

If we consider a closely-related usage (injected) it's probably fair to say the reason it's okay to say the patient was injected with [some medication] is because often the specific site of the injection doesn't matter much (the medication will be carried wherever it's needed, by the bloodstream). With topical medication (I use the term loosely), the medication is applied directly to the tissue it's supposed to be treating (a body part, not the whole body).