Joe Mistovich, You Magnificent Bastard

For the past month, I’ve been teaching my first full EMT class taught under the new EMS educational standards.

I’ve always sort of front-loaded anatomy and physiology in my courses, because I fervently believe that extra time spent in teaching how the body works makes it much easier to understand what to do when it’s working incorrectly. In the old days of proscriptive, detailed EMS curricula that required X amount of hours spent on Y subject, I’d always get way behind schedule in the first month or so of the course, then catch up later as my students breezed through the trauma and medical emergencies sections.

Now, with the implementation of educational standards over detailed curricula, I have the freedom to shape my courses as I see fit. Gone are the days when I had two syllabi; the official one I turned in to the state EMS office, and the other one that I really used.

For all of my teaching career, I’ve favored Brady textbooks for my classes, although I draw content from both their major authors.

Dan Limmer’s book is more skills-intensive, so I lean heavily on that in the psychomotor teaching and the how of EMT-level care.

Joe Mistovich’s book has always delved deeper into anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology, so I use lots of Joe’s stuff for the why of providing EMT-level care.

And when I say Joe’s book delves deeply into anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology, hoo boy, I wasn’t kidding. Normally, I can open a Powerpoint in any given chapter of an EMT textbook and just start talking, reasonably confident that I can flesh out the bullet points on the slide without much in the way of pre-class preparation.

Not so with Prehospital Emergency Care, 10th Edition. I find myself having to bone up a bit, to try to find a decent balance between enough information and too much. A lot of this stuff isn’t far below my paramedic course, 21 years ago.

For years, I’ve had to augment most of the instructional materials included with most of the textbooks I’ve used. This is the first one I’ve encountered where I had more material than I needed.

And that’s a good thing.