Recent content by Lemur

Plenty of great advice and wisdom in this thread. I agree that it just takes time and running calls to get more confidence. You’ll notice that once you have done twenty (arbitrary number here), respiratory distress calls the twenty first will feel a bit smoother. That’s because you’ve seen a...

The reason no reputable sources are echoing these claims is because this is a gross misrepresentation of what Ferguson actually said. He said deaths could be significantly scaled back with months of intense social distancing. And he quoted numbers from the table of the same publication people...

Again, media aside, the consensus is what it is, and dissenting views are quite limited in number. How do I know this? Because you can look investigators and labs well known in infectious disease transmission and modeling from coast to coast, and they are virtually all in agreement. They all...

True, there are some dissenting voices. But they aren’t really being pushed aside by the media, they are just an extremely tiny minority. There was an op ed in the NYT by David Katz on the 20th for example, where he argued for more selective measures to protect the elderly and other vulnerable...

Curious then, if not the keyboard epidemiologists, which ones are you listening to? There is a clear consensus in the community of scientists who study infectious disease - we are not overreacting, we are under-reacting. You can put the media aside- they having nothing to do with the expert...

I am resisting the urge to ignore this out of hand because I think there is some value in having a discussion. I’m not talking about an hypothetical scenario where a paramedic is facing the decision to transport a patient that is definitively outside of their scope of practice (by the way, a...

Wait really? We don’t know their scope of practice and if their license would actually be in any real danger. What we probably all know too well is that there isn’t much choice when I comes to turning down calls while working for a private ambulance service. I care for patients that I don’t...

End-tidal CO2 is really good for monitoring tube placement and also good as a rough look at ventilation- but often it doesn’t correlate well with the blood gasses. Without those, you don’t really know the patient’s underlying acid-base status. A good guess would be she is tachypneic from a...

SDN is not a legitimate source to get information about PA applicants. My understanding of the applicant pool comes from being in a leadership position with in my state’s PA academy and regularly working with faculty from multiple programs in our area and nationally on PA education related...

I think the larger point is we just don’t know the precise contributions of these various effects of the drug in its use to relieve chest pain. In my mind there is no clear reason to give it to patient with MI not complaining of chest discomfort because maybe it will increase collateral flow...

The idea that nitro dilates coronary arteries and that this is the mechanism responsible for its anti-anginal effects is probably not right. At least it’s not the full story. More likely it addresses the “demand” problem by reducing preload. In stable angina, the mechanism of the chest pain is...

PA programs are not filled with medical school applicants who didn’t get in. It’s not a point of great importance, but it’s wrong and it may negatively color some people’s perceptions so I thought I’d chime in. Generally people are admitted based on their merits as an applicant to the profession.