Everything We Know Is Wrong

In this week’s episode of Inside EMS, co-host Chris Cebollero and I discuss the latest EMS news, and take on the myths, urban legends, zebra events and bullshit that become dogma in EMS. Give us a listen, and chime in with your EMS urban legends!

In this week’s episode of Inside EMS, co-host Chris Cebollero and I kick over a hornet’s nest by daring to question: do we run hot way too much? Here’s my TL;DR version: Hell yes. Most of our patients could be adequately served with the cable installer’s response time; sometime next Tuesday between the hours of noon and 5:00 pm. All ...

Question: If a medical study were done in your city, comparing traditional medical treatment vs a placebo, would you consent to being a study subject? If you declined, would it change your mind if you knew that you’d only be enrolled in the study if your heart stopped beating, that the traditional medical treatment to restart it fails 93% of ...

That’s this week’s clinical topic on the Inside EMS podcast. Co-host Chris Cebollero says street experience is the glue that binds all the disparate knowledge and skills together to make a competent paramedic. I’ve written about this before. Go read that, and come back. I say experience is one of the most overrated buzzwords in EMS. It’s arbitrary and random, ...

Want to start a fight in an EMS social media forum? Just ask if EMTs diagnose. Invariably, you'll get hordes of people shitting their pants over a simple word, and twisting the English language into something unrecognizable in an effort to avoid calling something what it really is. General impression. Field diagnosis. Presumptive diagnosis. Field impression. We have an entire ...

In JEMS.com, we read about Lee County, FL adopting a cool new piece of spinal immobilization equipment: With the field trial complete, the team gained the approval from the Lee County Protocol Committee in February 2013. In March 2013, the Lee County Medical Care Council unanimously approved the “XCollar and Discriminate Spinal Immobilization Guideline.” (See Figure 1.) The guideline went ...

Emergency Resource Management is conducting its 3rd Annual Winter Seminar on Saturday, December 14 in Portland, CT. I'll be doing EMS Mythbusters and Thoracic Trauma lectures, and Chief Jon Politis will be doing a couple of lectures as well. This is likely your last chance to get CEU credit in 2013, and the seminar has been approved for 7.5 hours ...

EMS volunteer squads are like a battered wife, covered in bruises and scared of her own shadow, stuck in an abusive relationship with Small Town America.* Because, if you ever suggest that perhaps their town could and should pay them for their services, but never will as long as they're willing to provide them for free, they're all, "B-b-but I ...

… Bryan Bledsoe debunks your religion in the August issue of EMS World Magazine. And in that same issue, I take a dump on your altar. Our karma ran over your dogma.

… Gene Gandy and I have a new article in EMS World Magazine. Gotta give props to Gene, who did most of the heavy lifting in this one. Gene Gandy and Ambulance Driver, deconstructing EMS one myth at a time…

When I trained retrievers professionally, I used to get a steady stream of business from members of the By Gosh and By Gum Club, whose club motto went something like, “By gosh, it seemed like a good ideer, so by gum, that’s the way I done it.” They were the guys who thought the way to introduce their Lab pup ...

My writing partner Gene Gandy and I are planning a new series of monthly articles in EMS World Magazine. Each month, Gene and I are going to take on a particular piece of EMS dogma, myth or obsolete clinical practice, and subject it to the withering scrutiny of current research. We're still working on the series title, and we're compiling ...

Here on the blog and in various other EMS forums, I frequently challenge conventional wisdom on the care we provide. Other bloggers, like Rogue Medic, do it better, and more extensively. And in the responses to most of those missives, invariably there are a few who indignantly splutter, "B-b-but, that's not the way we learned it!" I'ver said it before ...