The Good Nurse: What are the drugs digoxin and insulin used for?

The Good Nurse, Netflix’s latest thriller with two fantastic leads, is now streaming. The movie tells the real-life story of serial killer Charles Cullen, a nurse who eventually confessed to killing 29 patients — though it’s believed the real number is closer to a whopping 400. Charles moved from hospital to hospital throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and he wasn’t caught until his co-worker, nurse Amy Loughren, stepped up to expose him and in turn save lives.

Though the new Netflix movie is a scripted dramatization of what happened, a lot of the things we see are true. For instance, we learn that Charles had been dosing patients with digoxin at another hospital, and at Parkfield with Amy, he’d been using insulin. That’s consistent with what happened in real life, with Charles purposefully overdosing patients.

What drugs did Charles Cullen use to kill patients?

According to WebMD, digoxin is a yellow, round tablet used to treat people with heart failure. It’s part of the cardiac glycosides class of drugs. Insulin, on the other hand, is a hormone your body produces to regulate the glucose in your blood. Diabetics don’t have enough insulin, so they are can have it prescribed as a drug to take through injections, depending on what type they have.

On their own and prescribed correctly, digoxin and insulin are not supposed to be dangerous. But what Charles was doing was fatal to these patients.

In real life, Charles secretly injected hospital patients with these drugs, but in the Netflix movie, he uses a slightly different strategy. In The Good Nurse, Amy catches him at Parkfield injecting insulin into the IV bags, meaning any nurse who is switching out patients’ bags could be killing them without knowing it. Either way is truly chilling.

You can now watch The Good Nurse on Netflix, and be sure to look out for the upcoming docuseries all about the case, Capturing the Killer Nurse, coming to the streamer on Nov. 11.