If we can use digital cameras to capture pictures of crashed cars to show the trauma team, can we use video cameras to record our patients’ “seizures” for later rebroadcast — not on You Tube, but for the patient’s ED doctor and consulting neurologist?

I have found that beating my breast and declaring I am a paramedic fatigues me more than it impresses someone else.

I’ve done a number of true anaphlyaxis calls over the years, and I can you, I would not want to look in my bag and find the epi gone. Because if the epi wasn’t there, those patients would be dead, and if the epi was missing because I failed to check my gear, then I would deserve life without parole.

Albert Schweitzer said, “Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than death himself…. We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege.”

The reason I don’t want to take oxygen as my number 1 drug is it is an over-rated drug, a misused drug, and a drug with little evidence-based research behind it.

I don’t use Ativan very much. I only used it three times last year, but when I use it, you can be sure I need it.

I think I sometimes take for granted what breathing treatments do. Someone is having a hard time breathing, lots of wheezes, you give them a treatment, they start breathing better. Pretty routine. Consider for a moment where the patients might end up if you didn’t have the treatments for them. Breathing treatments can keep moderate dsypneas from becoming respiratory failures.

I rank Normal Saline 6 out of the 33 drugs we carry. When I started as a paramedic the goal for every major trauma patient was to have two large bore IVs running wide open. The mark of a stud paramedic was getting your shooting victim to the trauma room in world record time while […]

I rate Dextrose (D50) 7 out of the 33 Drugs we carry. We use D50 for altered mental status due to hypoglycemia (where the patient is too altered to drink juice). I live in a big diabetic town. I gave D50 19 times last year. I sometimes joke that I am known as King Sugar […]

If Nitro was just for chest pain, it would not be in my Essential Eight. Nitro for pulmonary edema, on the other hand, is a different story.