{"id":7655,"date":"2018-07-27T07:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/?p=7655"},"modified":"2018-07-24T13:36:45","modified_gmt":"2018-07-24T17:36:45","slug":"paramedic-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/blog\/med-student-blog\/paramedic-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"Paramedic Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

For most of this site\u2019s readers, first year of med school is well in the past. You\u2019ve moved on from the monotony of books and PowerPoints to the revelation of actual cases. You see the subtle connections between text and reality, develop pattern recognition, and learn how medicine actually works. If you entered medical school expecting to heal the world, your perspective these days is probably a bit more cynical. But no matter how distant those pre-clinical years may seem, you have an absolutely massive bank of anatomy, physiology, and pathophysiology knowledge. You worked hard to get where you are, and you\u2019re a better healthcare provider for it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Then there are those of us who come to med school not from college, but from other medical fields: often nursing and EMS. In our prior careers, we skipped the basic science of the pre-clinical years and\u2026just kinda started doin\u2019 stuff. In med school I\u2019m given mounds of information to understand and memorize but am barely allowed to touch an actual patient; as a paramedic I was given six months of quasi-formal education before being expected to run a cardiac arrest, in a dark alley, while being nipped at by a gaggle of ferocious Chihuahuas.<\/span><\/p>\n

For myself and many others, med school is a big step back followed by a colossal step forward. As a paramedic, I made decisions I won\u2019t make again until well into residency. I\u2019ve developed a good recognition of sick and not-sick, can make a couple diagnoses from the door, and know that medicine is a massive gray area. I\u2019ve saved lives, but harmed a couple too. I\u2019ve worked under some really great doctors, but also remember the time I had to walk a panicked attending through an RSI, or the time I had to convince a senior resident my patient was, indeed, suicidal (she came into the ER after taking an entire bottle of amitriptyline a week later). If EMS taught me anything at all it\u2019s to trust my gut.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As a medical student, this skepticism has given me a bit of an independent streak. I often find myself straying from the curriculum, redefining what\u2019s important to my eventual practice and what isn\u2019t, and thinking about what patients\u2014rather than their karyotypes\u2014might actually look like given different pathologies. When we spend hours discussing pseudomembranous colitis but just minutes clarifying somatic vs visceral abdominal pain, I reprioritize. When I should be learning immunohistochemical markers, I\u2019m instead buried in an EM text. On one hand, this probably isn\u2019t great for my Step 1 prep. On the other, I think it\u2019s best to correct my often-flawed autodidactic learnings from my paramedic days before they become set in too deep. <\/span><\/p>\n

If med school has taught me anything, it\u2019s how little I know. There\u2019s definitely danger in learning medicine through naught but patient presentations and FOAMed. Eye-opening though these may be, clinical pearls can\u2019t supplant knowledge of basic physiology. And, as paramedic education often neglects this foundation, it\u2019s hard to know what information truly is <\/i>important. You can\u2019t find the answer if you don\u2019t know to ask the question. As a former provider of sorts, discovering this startling knowledge gap gives me a drive to improve prehospital training and patient follow-up throughout my career. But as a medical student, I realize how privileged I am to have cared for and learned from so many patients before starting school. Approaching medicine with actual clinical context keeps me invested in my education, and reminds me that med school is, indeed, where I want to be. It\u2019s a chance, I hope, to earn the trust that I used to take for granted. <\/span><\/p>\n

Tyler Prince<\/span><\/p>\n

MS2, University of Vermont College of Medicine<\/span><\/p>\n

Paramedic, Denver Health and Hospital Authority<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For most of this site\u2019s readers, first year of med school is well in the past. You\u2019ve moved on from the monotony of books and PowerPoints to the revelation of actual cases. You see the subtle connections between text and reality, develop pattern recognition, and learn how medicine actually works. If you entered medical school expecting to heal the world,
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":7656,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/coreem.net\/content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Bellevue-Ambulance-Bay.jpg?fit=600%2C400&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7655"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/134"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7655"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7657,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7655\/revisions\/7657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coreem.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}