Dustdevil

And again you fail. As for this whole BGL on every patient thing, it's just stupid! These are monkey protocols without any sound medical foundation. If your medical control has you doing this, you can pretty well assume they don't trust you and your assessment skills. Not that I can really blame them. I can give you a lot more justification for doing a pregnancy test on every female patient than you can ever give for doing a BGL on all patients. Man... the suck-arse state of some systems is just mind boggling. And the scary part is that their medics don't even realise it. :?

Another case of television imitating real life! It would be funny if it weren't so serious. :?

Damn, Beck! That's a great story! Too good to waste in the Funny Stuff forum!

Apparently, according to their website, they are going big time. LA County ALS. BLS in the OC and SD counties too. They're not proud enough of those uniforms to show them off on their website though. Their website sucks arse. I don't trust any employer who is more proud of their ambulances than their people. And they don't show their people at all on the site. Just trucks. Probably a good indicator of what priority they put on their people. That and the wankerish "Three Badges of Courage" icon on there. :roll: God, I hate Kalifornia.

I was busy brewing tea, mate! We have our bloody priorities straight over here!

Ah, but that is not what you said. You specifically included the skill of driving in your previous post. Neither the NREMT nor the IBEMS have the authority to certify that. And I can guarantee you that if you ask them to state what you just now stated for them, they will deny it and ask you to cease and decist with your misquoting of them. I'm sorry if you aren't happy that you've had BS called on you, but hey... we're about reality here. Search the site. Within two minutes, you will know exactly what most professional EMS providers have against volunteers. Bottom line is that they hurt the profession in ways too numerous to count. Now, if you are a professional EMS administrator, how do you think you would feel about somebody who, through either their own stupidity, naivete', or selfishness was damaging your profession and your business? No. It isn't. In medicine, bad experience is much worse than no experience at all. Most seasoned professionals will readily tell you that they would much rather have a fresh-out-of-school n00b than somebody with a couple of years of bad experience. It's not about large and small. It's about professional and non-professional. And the reason so many smaller communities don't have professional EMS is because there are so many wankers who will do it for a hobby, saving the community money to spend on janitors, and lawn boys, and Christmas lights for city hall. Funny how people always promote volunteerism, yet sit around and whine that there are so few paying EMS jobs. DUH! Sorry to burst your bubble, Bro. Sometimes the truth hurts. And many times in EMS, things aren't what you thought when you decided to go to EMT school. The way to deal with reality is to confront it, not to put your head in the sand and deny it. Stick around here and you will learn what EMS is really all about. Embrace the input and advice who have been in this field from the beginning and you won't be so disappointed in the future.

ERDoc answered the question I was asking, which was if there were actually 39,000 individual people applying (applicants), or if a smaller number of applicants was putting in 39,000 applications. In retrospect though, I obviously couldn't have been correct, as that would come out to less than three applications per applicant. But in the past, when I have heard much higher numbers, I know they had to be counting the number of applications total. I mean, when a school says they only took X number of new students out of XX number of applicants, that doesn't take into account that those they did not take probably got in somewhere else. It's always been my theory that those who didn't get in anywhere were simply fooling themselves by even applying in the first place. I mean seriously, does anybody with a 3.8 science GPA and great MCAT scores not get in? I may be wrong on this, but I am betting those who do that well land in a school somewhere. And those who don't are probably all those pipe-dreamers who really think that they are so special that somebody is going to make allowance for their 3.0 GPA or crap MCATs because it's their lifelong dream. Hell, we see those people on this board everyday. They just don't understand why we have to have all these high standards, and won't take no for an answer. I think those people drive up the rejection numbers.

If that were the case, why not take an actual employer to court instead of some pointless good ol' boys club of a volly house? I don't know where everybody gets this idea that volly experience means anything to most employers. Most employers I have ever known don't count it for anything. And many of them count it against you. Professionals just simply don't respect amateurs who degrade their profession. Whoa there, Sparky! You have written statements from the NREMT and the Iowa BEMS stating that? I'd be SHOCKED if you did. And both of those organisations would be very displeased with you putting words in their mouths.

Meh... you know what they say about statistics. :roll: You have to remember that each applicant is applying to multiple schools. Do we know for sure if they are taking this into account for their numbers, or are they counting each application as an "applicant," therefore skewing the numbers?

I trust diabetics. But I don't trust the judgement of anybody who would actually get a lawyer just to join a VOLUNTEER department. Hobbies are too easy to come by to go to court for one. :roll: Plus 10 to AMES for at least taking the professional route.

I worked with a couple of medics who were in med school in Grenada in the 80's. Heard they both graduated and are practising now, but I haven't kept in touch with them so I can't say I *know* them now. I worked with a surgery resident who was American, but attended med school in Guadalajara, and he was actually one of the sharpest in the group of residents, which surprised me. But he had been a nurse before, so it figures.

LOL, well actually I asked that because I have no idea what you are talking about. Never used a pen for anything more than writing down the results of my BGL, not for taking it. Can you elaborate on this process you are talking about? Damn, I seem to be getting worse at making my points clearly around here lately. I think I'm getting old timers disease. :? Anyhow, I wasn't taking a shot at your personal practice. I was merely drawing a parallel between taking BGLs and and performing all of the other portions of a physical exam that give us results we can do nothing about. Do you check your patient for his alertness and level of orientation? Why? You can't do anything about it. Battles Sign or Coons eyes? Can't do anything about it. Fluid in the ears? Can't do anything about it. Abdominal tenderness, masses, or pulsations? Why? Again, you can't do anything about it? If you're going to throw out physical exams because we can't do anything about the findings, that is one thing. But if you are just going to pick and choose them randomly, then that doesn't make any sense at all. If all we do is drive people to the hospital, then yes, we are just ambulance drivers. But if we render medical evaluation and care, we are medical providers. And if we are going to be medical providers, we need to be the best we can be, not just perform to a level that is convenient for us. Okay, no personal shots at you, but yeah... your service sucks.

1. Is that a rollerball pen, or just a regular ball point? Does it matter what colour ink we use? :? 2. Do you know the differences between capillary BGLs and venous? By that same logic, you could pretty well say that just about every bit of info an EMT elicits in their exam is unnecessary. So now we're back to just being ambulance drivers. Wonderful. :roll:

I hope this was a typo on your part, and not how it is actually written in the book. If so, it's pretty poorly written. It would have been much clearer to refer to INSPIRATION or VENTILATION (which are mechanical processes) instead of respiration (which is a chemical process). He often complains about having to dumb his books down to a 9th grade comprehension level, and I think this may be one example of where doing so kind of skewed the results. Okay, I have to admit up front that RT school was twenty-five years ago for me, so I may be way rusty on this stuff. But it seems what is being described here is not PEEP, but RETARD. Retard is the effect you get from pursed lip breathing. There is no positive pressure applied, just a retardation of the expiratory process. That isn't PEEP. The manufacturers may be calling it PEEP, but technically it is not. Am I wrong on this, Vent? :oops:

Two problems I see right off the bat. First, we don't treat numbers. We treat patients. If somebody is hypoglycaemic, and it has no relavancy to their condition, then you have no business doing anything about it. The chances of it being because of a pancreatic tumour or other such abnormality are pretty slim. The reason their sugar is low is because they haven't eaten all day. It'll fix itself. Second, if it is something that needs to be followed up on, you just screwed their labs with your amp of D50. You haven't fixed anything. Nothing was broken to begin with. Check your own BGL a few times a day and you'll probably find yourself hypoglycaemic at some point too. Why don't you go ahead and check everybody for a hernia too? There's just as many of those floating around as there are people with pathologically low blood sugar. How about prostate exams? You could actually save a life with that one. So why not do those too?

LOL! I remember that, now that you mention it! Mid 90s, I believe. I don't remember the particulars of the study methods though. Seems like it was just an informal statistic from kids presented to the ER. Mothers use a lot more than just the hand across the head to determine fever in a kid before rushing him to the ER, in most cases. A parent who is in-tune with their kid is at a definite advantage over a healthcare provider who doesn't know the kid. But yeah, I've had more than a few parents rush a kid in whose ONLY symptom was a hot forehead, and they are frequently right.

LOL! How the heck does something like this happen? You been time travelling again, Magic? :?

There are a great many conditions we diagnose that we cannot do anything for in the field. But we still need to know what is going on with our patient, regardless of the interventions we can offer. Otherwise, we look like complete idiots in our reports and on our charts for not picking up the obvious or significant clues to the patient's condition. A patient can run a significant fever without you noticing by feel. And, conversely, a patient can feel raging hot and have no fever at all. It's just not a reliable indicator. I read a study many years back where they tested nurses abilities to tell a temp by feeling with their hands, and the results were quite dismal. It's just interesting that EMT schools get all focused on this DCAPBTLS and other pointless acronym madness, looking for obscure, rare signs on every patient, while never even covering the obvious and useful. It's criminal that a school would even mention fever without ever covering the proper way to take it or interpret it. But, then again, most people who teach EMT school don't even know themselves.

We're "all" full of it? I have to agree with him. You haven't shown us any real evidence of education yet. Just some memorised protocols. And, here's your sign...

Actually, the biggest problem with the ear temp is that it must be properly aimed at the TM in order to work correctly. And how exactly are we supposed to do that? You can't see the TM with it. And most EMTs wouldn't know what a TM looked like if it is staring them in the face, much less how to find it. So, what happens is that the vast majority of the time, you end up taking the temp of the EAC or of a big ear booger instead of the TM. Not accurate in the least. The technology is sound. The application falls far short of the promise. Oral temps are more affected by environmental factors. And again, too few people are good about finding and maintaining proper probe placement to get a good, steady reading. I watch medics all the time hand the thing to the patient and let the patient place it themselves without checking for placement. Bad form. I find axillaries to actually be more consistent than orals, because they are subject to fewer environmental factors. But again, like the oral, proper placement is key, and must be maintained throughout the measurement. But while this may be acceptable for routine screening, there is no place for this in really sick patients. Moot point since darn few ambos carry or regularly use thermometers anyhow. :roll:

That is technically CPAP. Pressure to keep the alveoli open is CPAP. Pressure to keep the alveoli open in between ventilator cycles is PEEP. Both of what you described above are CPAP. Again, don't get hung up on the semantics, as it is quite normal for the two terms to be used interchangeably, and nobody really cares.

Them dudes burned out YEARS ago. Sack 'em. Leave them with nothing to show for twenty years but a bad attitude and a bad back.