Leaderboard

My name is Ash. I'm a 22 year old student from Kansas.

Young is good. Naive is good. Naivity is the fountain from which novel ideas flow, unimpeded by the blockage of bitterness and inflexibility. As far as gullible goes, I think the greater harm here is to be gullible enough to really believe that single-digit survival rates are the best we can do, and that's exactly what we're getting out of tubes and drugs. That is the old way. It's time to try something new, something radical, and something which maybe, just maybe, will give us some real, dramatic increases in survivability. As far as anecdote... well, I don't really have much use for it, nor do I think many others on these forums do. I think that's why most people who come to these forums are attracted to them. Because at the heart of it, they come here seeking more than what they're finding in the EMS community today. Something more than the anecdote-filled, unscientific dogma and catch-phrase-filled culture that proliferates our industry... It's awesome that you're passionate about something, but at the end of the day, don't you want cardiac arrest survival and survival to discharge neurologically intact and with a good quality of life post-discharge to be something routine and not just a "handful in a career" type of deal? At the end of the day, most people who die die with good reason... they're old and infirm beyond what is compatible with life. But for some, we have a real chance at returning productive life to folks. Why squander that with unproven treatments like epinephrine, intubation, and transport of active-arrests? If we just start from the bottom, from the very basis of science, that nothing is true until it is proven, and work our way up from there, we will accomplish a million times more and uncover the truth to so much more than we will trying to insist on the veracity of something that (paradoxically) is proving very difficult to prove: that ETI is beneficial. What do we know works? I mean really KNOW, backed by irrefutable evidence? That chest compressions and defibrillation increases survivability. What do we NOT know works? What does NOT have irrefutable or unquestionable evidence? PPV, ETI, drugs. What do we know DOESN'T work? What has been discounted, disproven, etc? Transporting active arrests. Even you have to admit that there is a lot of questions surrounding the true benefit of ETI, when you start quantifying and qualifying it. Should we be routinely practicing that which has not been irrefutably proven true? Or should we strike it out and go with what we KNOW, and treat everything else as "in need of testing" until proof of benefit appears?