Experience VS Paramedic

[MetalMedic]

No pity here. You seem smart, and funny, and kind...I have every confidence that you will someday find a strong, stable man to take care of you...

Nod Dust..Hopefully you know I wasn't really curious if an arrest was hypoglycemic but as to the criteria that the poster may have used to determine that, 'cause I'm confident that it wasn't anchored in A&P.

Dwayne

Also, MetalMedic, though I'm confident that you would see the humor in my comment as being grounded in irony, thus in no way my true opinion of you or your actual capabilities where it concerns taking care of you and your babe...I'm making it clear here, just in case I've over assumed so that you don't kill me in my sleep...just sayin'...

Why do you think I'm going into the medical field? Momma needs to find a nice rich doctor!

-MetalMedic

This is just my witty reply to your smart alec comment. I won't get you in your sleep tonight, but I'd sleep with one eye open....

[FireMedic65]

Why do you think I'm going into the medical field? Momma needs to find a nice rich doctor!

-MetalMedic

This is just my witty reply to your smart alec comment. I won't get you in your sleep tonight, but I'd sleep with one eye open....

how about a crna?

[Dustdevil]

Nod Dust..Hopefully you know I wasn't really curious if an arrest was hypoglycemic but as to the criteria that the poster may have used to determine that, 'cause I'm confident that it wasn't anchored in A&P.

Yeah, sorry for being unclear who I was directing my reply to. It certainly wasn't you. No worries.

[ash_emt]

Alright it took me a couple days to get back on here. I guess I should have specified that the patient started out in PEA and the family told us that the patient was diabetic. So my first instinct was to check his sugar. H's and T's. And I didnt do anything out of my scope of practice. As an enhanced I can start a line and push D50 and dont need permission to do so. But I wont have to worry about working with that medic again because he was fired shortly after. But he was the type of medic that didnt think about BLS because he tested for his basic like a month before his paramedic. So he always jumped into ALS mode rather than think BLS first

[mobey]

Alright it took me a couple days to get back on here. I guess I should have specified that the patient started out in PEA and the family told us that the patient was diabetic. So my first instinct was to check his sugar. H's and T's. And I didnt do anything out of my scope of practice. As an enhanced I can start a line and push D50 and dont need permission to do so. But I wont have to worry about working with that medic again because he was fired shortly after. But he was the type of medic that didnt think about BLS because he tested for his basic like a month before his paramedic. So he always jumped into ALS mode rather than think BLS first

So because of what you now admit as one experience with an "ALS first" medic, that gives you the right to generalize all medics under that umbrella and give shitty advice to people just entering this profession?

[DwayneEMTP]

Yeah, sorry for being unclear who I was directing my reply to. It certainly wasn't you. No worries.

No need to apologize. Actually this post has been haunting me because I couldn't remember exactly why. In general it was clear, but I couldn't have explained it to you molecule by molecule, and it's really not that difficult of a concept.

So that got me to thinking..."What else have I forgotten now that I"m several years post A&P?" Holy shit..the list turned out to be legendary!! I was shocked not by how much I'd forgotten, but by how little I'd remember. Remote medicine, in my current context is cool...I love to be a long way from help, but the skill/knowledge atrophy is horrendous!

The city is at least as valuable for teaching me where I'm lacking as it is for allowing me to exercise what I know.

Dwayne

[Kaisu]

What else have I forgotten now that I"m several years post A&P?" Holy shit..the list turned out to be legendary!! I was shocked not by how much I'd forgotten, but by how little I'd remember.

Amen brother. The answer to that is supposedly the bi-annual paramedic refresher required by NREMT. I just took it a couple of months ago and it was a joke. I would like to audit the last 2 semesters of my paramedic program. (not any paramedic program, the one I took.) Not sure how I would work that tho...

[tcripp]

Amen brother. The answer to that is supposedly the bi-annual paramedic refresher required by NREMT. I just took it a couple of months ago and it was a joke. I would like to audit the last 2 semesters of my paramedic program. (not any paramedic program, the one I took.) Not sure how I would work that tho...

That thought has crossed my mind as well. To go back and audit certain classes now that I have a better idea of what they were trying to teach in the first place.

[DwayneEMTP]

Yeah...I have had thoughts of retaking Bio202 and Pathophys now that I have a several thousand patients to use for context..

And auditing medic classes would be fun if for no other reason than to see what I'd looked like before I'd had a few big successes and failures under my belt to add perspective... :-)

Dwayne

[Dustdevil]

But he was the type of medic that didnt think about BLS because he tested for his basic like a month before his paramedic. So he always jumped into ALS mode rather than think BLS first

I can't really claim to know you, but from your writings, it does not appear that you have either the education or experience to make that determination. It's a little presumptuous for you to speculate on the intricacies of a process that you have yet to personally undergo. In my thirty-eight years in medicine, it has been my overwhelming observation that, for the most part, you are dead wrong, no pun intended. In fact, most medics with half my experience will tell you that the best partners they ever had, had zero EMT experience prior to paramedic school. I will tell you as a long time instructor, my best medic students are usually those with the least basic experience. If you are seeing something different, it is a very negative reflection on the quality of your system locally.

To re-quote from page 3 of this thread:

When you get to paramedic school, you will notice that there exist a peculiar sub-species of student. S/he is the one who wastes everyone's time with frequent interruptions to either argue with the instructor, or to dazzle us all with war stories that are usually irrelevant and ninety-percent bullshyte. These students usually graduate (if at all) with much less knowledge than their unexperienced fellow students because they think their experience gave them such a "leg up" on education, that they cannot be convinced that they still have much more to learn. They spend a lot of time tuning out the instructor when he covers pathophysiology and other complicated topics that he is convinced you don't really have to know just to start an IV or hit a tube. To them, it's all about skills, because for the last few years, that is all he has seen of the medics' practice. He is SO wrong.

If your eyes are open, and you stay in EMS long enough to call yourself an experienced medic, you will come to see this yourself. It would behove you to listen up and understand it now, rather than being "that guy" -- just like the one who got fired -- for the next decade.

As earlier stated, if a paramedic sucks, it has everything to do with his paramedic educational process, and very little else. With this moronic line of thought of yours, you sound like Critchitymedic claiming that blacks can't be successful today because someone held slaves 150 years ago. It's nonsense.

Edited April 18, 2011 by Dustdevil