Without evidence of benefit, an intervention should not be presumed to be beneficial or safe.

- Rogue Medic

How Do We Handle a Long Day


At Looking Through A Pair Of Pink Handled Trauma Shears there is an excellent post about the ways that we can manage our reactions to the many different dangers that affect us on calls. Physical, emotional, and everything else that might encourage us to behave as badly as some of the people we encounter.

Long Day

Too often we respond to stupidity with more stupidity. Raise the volume, push back, et cetera. Since we were not dispatched to treat the stupidity, to raise the volume, or to push back, should we allow ourselves to become controlled by something a bit beyond out treatment capabilities?

On the other hand, we can always make things worse. Shao does not make this mistake.

One of our problems in EMS is that we try to put everything and everybody into categories, such as protocols. We tend to define them by the most extreme example to be found within these categories. We let our biases blind us to the failure of these categories to accurately describe what we put in the category.

Why?

Because we no longer think about why we apply these biases. Biases are like reflexes, they bypass the brain. Shao does not make this mistake.

naive – definition
ADJECTIVE /nɑˈiv/
or naïve

a naive person lacks experience of life and tends to trust other people and believe things too easily

Shao does not lack experience, she chooses not to be cynical. We have more choices, less biased choices, than cynicism and naiveté.

Go read the whole story.

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