Declarations of a Dinosaur

When I first entered the blogosphere, I mostly read and linked the gun blogs. Soon thereafter came my fellow EMS bloggers, and finally a number of physician and nursing blogs found their way onto my blogroll. I follow quite a few, and I get something different from each one.

Dr. Lucy Hornstein of Musings of a Dinosaur is where I go for my daily dose of medical wit and wisdom.

People often mistakenly believe I’m in EMS because I crave the excitement or the variety of it, and truthfully that is a part of the attraction, even if the adrenaline rushes are harder and harder to find at this stage of my career.

No, the real reason I stay in EMS is because there is little ambiguity in what I do. Call an ambulance, an ambulance comes. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, young, black, white, sinner or saint, I answer every 911 call the same way. At the heart of it, what keeps me going in EMS is my clinging to this foolish ideal that medicine matters more than money.

Of course, in the real world, we know that isn’t true. Trace every major issue in health care, and at its root you will find dollar signs, or the lack thereof. But still, it’s nice to find a fellow Quixote now and then; a kindred soul tilting at the same windmills.

I suppose that’s what attracts me to Dr. Dino’s blog. Her tagline says it all: A Family Doctor in solo private practice; I may be going the way of the dinosaur, but I’m not dead yet.

Declarations of a Dinosaur: 10 Laws I’ve Learned as a Family Doctor delivers, with Dr. Hornstein’s typical wit and wisdom, a set of truths about medicine that will resonate not only with her fellow primary care physicians, but anyone who works in health care. It should be required reading for any medical student contemplating a primary care specialty.

Heck, it should be required reading for any doctor, because along with an unflinching insider’s view of what is killing primary care, it also gives us some inspiration that there is life in the old girl still.

Primary care, that is, not Dr. Hornstein. As far as I know, Lucy Hornstein is neither dying, nor an old girl.

I finished the book Friday afternoon before work, and on a lark, I dropped my copy off in one of the local ERs. It was a slow night, and as it so happens, one of the family practice residents doing a rotation there is a former paramedic and coworker.

I plopped Lucy’s book on the counter in front of him and invited him to read. Before I had completed my run ticket, he and several of the ER nurses were flipping through the pages, chortling out loud, “Hey y’all, get this! Third Law: the urgency of the test is inversely proportional to the IQ of the insurance company pre-authorization clerk!”

When I came back a couple of hours later, the book had changed hands, and the triage nurse had her head buried in its pages, smiling just as broadly as my buddy the family practice resident. I had to politely knock on the counter to get her attention that we had brought her a patient.

At 239 pages, the book is a short read but not a lightweight one. I’ve often said that the essence of wisdom is in packaging profound truths in simple phrases.

By that measure, Lucy Hornstein is wise indeed.

Buy it and read it, y’all. It’s that good.