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If you are drinking anything that contains alcohol while on duty, you have no right to touch a patient, ever.

I don't know if the answer is yes but I think that we are the best that many can get. Often we are their first route and often their only route to the healthcare system and it's incumbent on us to be their advocates and like Dwayne says, we should be doing the type of stuff that he mentioned on every call. How much more time does it take to look around the house and say "you know, I noticed you have a bunch of throwrugs on the floor. Those are fall hazards and you should get rid of them" and then help them remove the rugs. Who knows, your actions may save some elderly person from falling and breaking a hip. I always look in their kitchen, and bathroom if I can and that tells me a lot about how they are eating or what goes on in the bathroom. Lots of meds nilly willy inthe medicine chest, I'll write their dosage and times to take out on a piece of paper I designed and give it to them. Saves me the trouble of writing the stuff down in the future and gives the person a list of their meds when they go to the hospital. I look at their kitchen and if it looks like they haven't eaten today I'll offer to make em a sandwich or I'll put a bug in the ear of our social workers to put them on the list of who needs help or to help set up a social worker visit. That's just me though.

There you go, singling out the black people. You are such a racist cracker. Seriously though, are paramedics, with the current state of education, er, training, really the best people to be doing this?

Until we cure death, get rid of alcohol and eliminate stupidity and testosterone, there will always be a need for EMS.

I see the old "don't treat pain because it interferes with the exam" line a couple of times and in modern practice it usually is met with some guffaws. Personally, when I have several titles after my name and I get to have an input into practice (it'll happen some day... stop laughing), I'm going to suggest modern prehospital care move towards inducing amnesia in multi-systems trauma rather than try to achieve anesthesia or analgesia. Having under gone two procedures where the only medication I was given was midazolam, I can tell you first hand that it is very effective for mediating painful situations. I realize it doesn't have an analgesic effect, but I ask you, would you rather remember being in not so much pain when being extricated with bilateral femur fractures, or just not remember the situation at all?