Years ago I worked for a United States Senator.  One of my early jobs for him was driving him around the state to campaign functions and speeches.  Every now and then someone would give him a hard time about all the rotten people in Washington.  He had a great answer.  He said we were a […]

A bill has been introduced in Congress that will eliminate the financial penalty (in the form of reduced Medicare reimbursements) hospitals pay for failure to keep patients pain-free. Currently the amount of money Medicare pays a hospital is affected by the results of a patient satisfaction survey known as the “Hospital Consumer Survey of Healthcare […]

The results are in.  In an article, Amiodarone, Lidocaine, or Placebo in Out-of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest, published in yesterday’s New England Journal of Medicine by Peter J. Kudenchuk, M.D., Siobhan P. Brown, Ph.D, and others, the results of a major randomized double blinded study involving paramedics from ten major cities in North America (The Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium […]

I wrote this a couple months ago when I was feeling really burned out.  The burnout passed, as I knew it would, and I am back to myself, so I can post it now. (1) I have been responding to 911 calls for twenty-six years, 21 as a full time paramedic with a busy urban commercial […]

I wrote recently about my new found concern about giving opiates to patients with chronic pain. Opiates for Chronic Pain Subsequently as a member of our regional medical advisory committee, I submitted the following draft proposal: Paramedic Chronic Pain Management Guidelines (Draft) Providing opiates to certain patients with chronic pain conditions may not always be […]

The mental health team meets us outside. “We should wait for the police,” the clinician says. “She’s a big woman. When we went back up there she had a knife near her that wasn’t there the first time we were up with her. She’s very anxious today. When she’s off her meds, she can be […]