The First EMS What-if-We’re-Wrong-a-Thon

oops-my-bad

The EMS world is full of people with opinions.

This is a contentious business, and most days, it’s hard to kick a rock without hitting two paramedics having an argument. Usually, if you listen in, you’ll realize it’s one of the golden oldies, some debate older than Johnny and Roy — fire-based vs. private ambulances, ALS- vs. BLS-dominant systems, epinephrine in cardiac arrest, the role of spinal immobilization, and so on. These are topics with two opposing camps and very little room in the middle. (Nothing’s more odious than a fence-sitter.)

The thing is, if you step back and look at most of these debates, you have to admit that there are some massively intelligent, rational, well-educated people in both camps. It’s not The Smart People on one side and A Bunch of Loonies on the other. That wouldn’t really be a controversy, would it? We’d just ignore the loonies and move on. These issues only persist because there are legitimate arguments both Yea and Nay.

But you wouldn’t think that if you waded into the trenches and took your own stand. Although you might start out “seeing both sides,” by the time you’ve done your fifteenth blog post, your tenth column, your third published review, or your 100th lecture, all hammering the same bullet-points… well, after a while, you start wondering just how any nincompoop could possibly disagree with you. You’ve been dismissing the opposition’s arguments for so long that you can no longer give them any serious consideration.

Here’s an example: I am personally very skeptical about the value of emergency department thrombolysis for ischemic stroke. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced that it’s a bad idea, but I am fairly convinced that the evidence in its favor is poor, and I believe this with sufficient ardor that I start to get a throbbing headache whenever someone advocates too loudly for tPA. On a bad day, I’ll admit that I occasionally want to throw up my hands and say, “What are these morons thinking?”

Well, these morons are hundreds of exceptionally knowledgable researchers and physicians, and what they’re thinking is that they have a slightly different perspective on the data. They are actually not stupid or insane. And that’s the key here. Maybe I’m right, maybe they’re right. But we’re both wrong if we think the debate is over, and no rational person could disagree with us. Equipoise remains; reasonable people can go either way.

The debate rages on. We’ve just picked a side.

And so, while we may spend 99% of our time waving our preferred banners, it behooves us to occasionally take pause and remember that the other side is not composed of morons, and their points have some validity. It’s good to reflect upon why, even though we’re so smart, other smart people still disagree with us. And to truly weigh and consider those reasons as viable, not just as straw-men to be refuted.

That’s why today, we’re holding…

The First Great EMS What-if-We’re-Wrong-a-Thon

The what?

Today, six EMS writers, bloggers, and pundits have agreed to take one of their pet issues… one of the topics they argue, espouse, teach, and defend… and try to prove the other side.

If they believe that volunteer EMS is a tool of the devil, they’ve written an earnest screed arguing why volunteers are an essential feature of modern prehospital care. If they’ve based their career on railing against unnecessary use of helicopter transportation, they’ve done their best to defend air ambulances and prove their worth.

What’s the point of this exercise?

In part, it’s for the same reason that the Catholic Church appoints “devil’s advocates,” why debate teams are expected to be equally convincing from both “pro” or “con” positions, and why computer security outfits hire “penetration testers” to try to attack their own networks. Making a serious effort to destroy your own beliefs is the best way to strengthen them. You can’t do this from within your own fortress of opinions; inside there, it’s one big echo chamber without any perspective. You need to step outside your skin, pretend you haven’t spent ten years singing the same tune, and hold a Bizarro day in order to realize what you’ve been missing.

But that’s not the most important reason for this. The most important reason is humility.

We all think we’re right about what we believe. That’s why we believe it. And that’s fine.

Yet if we cross the line into thinking we cannot possibly be wrong, we’re no longer engaging in rational debate. We’re just shouting, shouting, shouting our personal dogma. If the answer to the question, “What could convince you to change your mind?” is nothing!, that’s called religion, not reason.

Only an idiot is always right. So we asked some prominent figures from the EMS world to take a day and show us how they’re willing to be wrong.

Participating posts are linked below. Go flip through them, and applaud the authors for the courage it takes to hammer upon your own ramparts. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to take a deep breath and acknowledge that you could be wrong too.

Authors

Michael Morse (Rescuing Providence) — Strong opponent of civilian Narcan (naloxone) distribution programs. He argues here why they actually might be a good idea.

Jeff Poland — Advocate of endotracheal intubation is the gold standard of airway management. He argues why we should be using supra-glottic airways as our first line intervention instead. (Guest hosted courtesy of Christopher Watford at My Variables Only Have 6 Letters.) He’s not to be confused with…

Ben Dowdy — … who argues why we should be abandoning prehospital endotracheal intubation altogether. (Guest hosted courtesy of Brooks Walsh at Mill Hill Ave Command.)

Greg Friese (EMS1) — Passionate proponent of non-traditional models of education. He argues why we should “unflip the classroom” and bring back standard lecture-based instruction for EMS training.

Vince DiGiulio (EMS 12-Lead) — Long-time believer in STEMI activation based on field ECG interpretation by well-trained paramedics. He argues why they should be transmitting their strips for physician interpretation instead.

Amy Eisenhauer (The EMS Siren) — Usually an advocate for professionalism among EMS providers; she makes a case here that sometimes, professionalism can have its downsides.

Either Lead, Learn, or Please Stop Talking

The Internet is a wonderful educational resource.

I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but it’s good to be reminded. As little as 20 years ago, it simply wasn’t possible to learn things in the same way or to the same extent as today, because you had to seek out the information like Indiana Jones hunting a lost jewel-encrusted kumquat. Now there are a thousand PhD’s worth of knowledge available for anyone with a modem (although it behooves us to remember that much of it is still more easily found offline, and some remains completely undigitized even now).

I have always relied heavily upon this resource, and the majority of the synapses currently rattling around my noggin wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for the ’net. I went to school, sure, but when it came to pursuing my interests and hobbies, that’s not where the money was. It even filled the bowl of my early work history — I worked in web design, various sectors of freelance writing, even as a certified locksmith, all of it made possible by self-education via an endless tap of bits and bytes.

When I first became involved in EMS, I expected that to remain true. But it wasn’t.

EMS 2.0: Good, bad, and ugly

Although somewhat inchoate in my early days, the EMS 2.0 movement was already getting legs, and was driven by an online community of paramedical luminaries hoping to remodel our damaged field into a modern, functioning system.

More recently, the larger arena of the medical community — with emergency medicine leading the way — has embraced FOAM, the general principle of free online medical knowledge-sharing. This is good stuff, and it’s just what we need.

But when I was a green EMT — and we all know how unprepared a freshly certified newbie can be — I turned to the web in the hopes it would help me learn, improve, and become better at my job. To some extent, it did. But I was also stymied.

Everywhere I turned I found veteran EMTs and paramedics advocating for increased education and training within our field. They seemed to passionately believe in making prehospital providers become better clinicians. Yet whenever I would ask medical questions to try and do exactly that — become better — I wouldn’t get answers. I would get further diatribes about the shortcomings of EMS education. Or suggestions to read a textbook (only rarely was one recommended). Or, if I pressed the point, the advice to go to paramedic or even medical school, because this sort of inquiry was likely to make me a fish out of water in my current profession.

Truth be told, I rarely got any answers where I didn’t dig them up myself. And I found this strange. Why would people purportedly so interested in advancing their profession seem to have so little motivation to actually do it?

Time has passed, and I have more perspective. In retrospect, the folks on the other end of the screen often didn’t know the answers to the questions I was asking, or only knew the answers in an incomplete or experiential way. Time has also brought along some actual progress, and there are more true FOAM resources out there.

Yet in the prehospital world, noisemaking still seems to predominate over knowledgemaking. For every blog post, website, forum thread, or social media group dedicated to transmitting information, there are ten whose primary occupation is posting long, repetitive screeds about the gaps in EMS education and the sorry state of our profession.

Now, everybody has a life outside of the internet (well, most everybody), and some of these people are indeed practicing what they preach. They’re teaching and precepting, writing and organizing, even lobbying to accomplish the changes we all dream of achieving.

Many others, though, seem to have endless time and energy for complaining about how dumb everyone else is, and very little for correcting that dumbness. More disturbingly, in recent times, the tone of these complaints has taken a strange turn toward arrogance. Novices foolish enough to poke out their heads are decried for not being up to the level of the complainer (interestingly, the level of the complainer is usually presumed to be the appropriate one — nothing more and nothing less). I imagine a great deal of this stems from frustration. But it certainly doesn’t contribute to a solution, nor does it speak very highly of the veterans behind the keyboards, who are missing the opportunity both to educate and to model professionalism. (Hint: there is no degree of expertise that ever makes arrogance appropriate.)

Yes, ideally we will move to a place where everybody staffing an ambulance has a strong initial education in anatomy, physiology, pathology, and medicine. Yes, this will probably entail degree-granting programs and a fundamental paradigm shift from our current model of training. But until then, there are thousands of EMTs and paramedics on the road or in the classroom with a grossly limited knowledge-base, and a significant number of them are motivated to do better than that. Are you going to blow them off until the day of rapture, or are you going to try and help?

I didn’t want to write this post, because I didn’t want to be part of the problem. This site aims to be zero percent complaining and 100% educating. But we’re just a drop in the bucket, because there are a lot of smart people out there who could do far more good than a hundred EMS Basics, and I wish they would remember it.

Murder by Checklist

Reader Steve Carroll passed along this recent case report from the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

It’s behind a paywall, so let’s summarize.

What happened

A young adult male was shot three times — right lower quadrant, left flank, and proximal right thigh. Both internal and external bleeding were severe. A ~~physician bystander~~* tried to control it with direct pressure, to no avail.

With two hands and a lot of force, however (he weighed over 200 pounds), he was able to hold continuous, direct pressure to the upper abdomen, tamponading the aorta proximal to all three wounds.

Bleeding was arrested and the patient regained consciousness as long as compression was held. The bystander tried to pass the job off to another, smaller person, who was unable to provide adequate pressure.

When the scene was secured and paramedics arrived, they took over the task of aortic compression. But every time they interrupted pressure to move him to the stretcher or into the ambulance, the patient lost consciousness again. Finally en route, “it was abandoned to obtain vital signs, intravenous access, and a cervical collar.”

The result?

Within minutes, the patient again bled externally and became unresponsive. Four minutes into the 9-minute transfer, he had a pulseless electrical activity cardiac arrest, presumed a result of severe hypovolemia. Advanced cardiac life support resuscitation was initiated and continued for the remaining 5-minute transfer to the ED.

The patient did not survive.

When the cookbook goes bad

The idea of aortic compression is fascinating, but I don’t think it’s the most important lesson to this story.

Much has been said about the drawbacks of rigidly prescriptive protocol-based practice in EMS. But one could argue that our standard teachings allow for you to defer interventions like IV access if you’re caught up preventing hemorrhage. Like they say, sometimes you never get past the ABCs.

The problem here is not necessarily the protocols or the training. It’s the culture. And it’s not just us, because you see similar behavior in the hospital and in other domains.

It’s the idea that certain things just need to be done, regardless of their appropriateness for the patient. It’s the idea that certain patients come with a checklist of actions that need to be dealt with before you arrive at the ED. Doesn’t matter when. Doesn’t matter if they matter.

It’s this reasoning: “If I deliver a trauma patient without a collar, vital signs, and two large-bore IVs, the ER is going to tear me a new one.”

In other words, if you don’t get through the checklist, that’s your fault. But if the patient dies, that’s nobody’s fault.

From the outside, this doesn’t make much sense, because it has nothing to do with the patient’s pathology and what might help them. It has everything to do with the relationship between the paramedic and the ER, or the paramedic and the CQI staff, or the paramedic and the regional medical direction.

Because we work alone out there, without anybody directly overseeing our practice, the only time our actions are judged is when we drop off the patient. Which has led many of us to prioritize the appearance of “the package.” Not the care we deliver on scene or en route. Just the way things look when we arrive.

That’s why crews have idled in ED ambulance bays trying over and over to “get the tube” before unloading. That’s why we’ve had patients walk to the ambulance, climb inside, and sit down, only to be strapped down to a board.

And that’s why we’ve let people bleed to death while we record their blood pressure and needle a vein.

It’s okay to do our ritual checklist-driven dance for the routine patients, because that’s what checklists are for; all the little things that seem like a good idea when there’s time and resources to achieve them. But there’s something deeply wrong when you turn away from something critical — something lifesaving — something that actually helps — in order to achieve some bullshit that doesn’t matter one bit.

If you stop tamponading a wound to place a cervical collar, that cervical collar killed the patient. If you stop chest compressions to intubate, that tube killed the patient. If you delay transport in penetrating trauma to find an IV, that IV killed the patient.

No, let’s be honest. If you do those things, you killed the patient.

Do what actually matters for the patient in front of you. Nobody will ever criticize you for it, and if they do, they are not someone whose criticism should bother you. The only thing that should bother you is killing people while you finish your checklist.

* Correction: the bystander who intervened was not a physician, but “MD” (Matthew Douma), the lead author, who is an RN. — Editor, 7/22/14

Child-rearing and You

Despite my forays into educational writing like this, I have never been an FTO.

Field Training Officers or preceptors are responsible for training and supervising new hires, who typically work for several weeks as an additional third crewmember (or “third rider”) while learning the ropes. For various reasons, I’m not sure I’d be good at this, and I’ve never pursued it. On the other hand, regardless of what I want to pursue, I’ve never been able to avoid working with new partners.

By “new,” I mean minty-green new — folks who have never worked on an ambulance, or in some cases, never worked a job at all. Since this kind of EMT is usually paired with a fairly senior partner early on — and since not many people stick with this job long enough to be “senior” — if you’ve been doing this for a few years, you’ll usually wind up with a new guy sitting next to you. It is what it is.

Standard operating procedure is to drink lots of coffee, grumble, boss them around, and let them gradually absorb whatever useful knowledge you inadvertently leak out. Unfortunately, this is both stressful for the new guy, and something less than fully enriching; they learn as many bad habits as good practices, and become jaded faster than they become competent.

I am not a gifted teacher when it comes to in-person training. But like most things in this job, by learning it the hard way, I’ve developed some useful insights. So here are a few pointers for bringing along your new guy and molding them into the very bestest EMT they can be.

Make your expectations clear

For you, it’s Wednesday, you’re tired, and for some reason your left knee keeps clicking. But for them, it’s their first day on an ambulance, and everything is new.

The best thing you can do is to clarify how this game is going to work. What’s going to happen when you walk into a call? How are you going to assign responsibility? What do they know, what do they need to know, and how will that process occur?

I once punched in to find a partner I hadn’t met before. Ten minutes into checking the truck, we got sent out to a seizure at the department store. I drove, she teched. But each time I tried to let her “do her thing,” she just froze like a deer in headlights. Turned out, this was the first shift she’d worked — ever — and her entire training period had been spent running routine transfers. She wasn’t just unpracticed, she hadn’t even seen most of what takes place on an emergency call, never mind attempted it.

Although you could call this a gross failure of the training process (I did), the underlying lesson is that you never know what you’re dealing with. Your partner may have years of experience at another service; he may have just finished high school and never worked a full-time job; he might be a new EMT, but just spent twenty years as a veteran CNA. Maybe he’s a few months in, comfortable with certain situations, but wholly new to others. You need to know where they’re coming from. Not only will they resent the stress and panic induced by stranding them when they don’t know what to do, but they’re just as likely to resent your butting-in (whether explaining something or actually taking over) when they do know what to do; the dividing line can be nearly invisible, but is very real.

Some points to consider:

Who drives? Many seniors tend to do most of the driving while their newbie techs in back. The theory here is that you should “learn the back before you learn the front” — that is, patient care before driving and navigation. I find this arbitrary, since driving is as important to this job (and sometimes as difficult to do well) as anything else. It’s reasonable to focus on one skillset before developing the other, but I think driving should start early, because eventually they’re going to be forced into it anyway (driving for an ALS unit, perhaps), and they need to be ready. Start almost immediately by letting them drive between calls on routine matters; this acclimates them to handling the ambulance and navigating your service area. Once they’ve figured that out, they can do some emergency driving on responses. When you’re comfortable they can safely get from Point A to Point B, let them drive while occupied with patients — if they know where they’re going, or at least have a reliable GPS. But don’t throw them into this without some instruction on how to drive smoothly and safely, or you’ll spend the trip getting angry while you slide around the bench, and they won’t know why.
Who does what on emergency scenes? Working with experienced partners, I cleave to the golden rule: the tech runs the call, while the driver shuts up and helps out. This makes it easy to avoid stepping on each other’s toes or going different ways. If you’re the tech and your new partner is driving, this still works, because you’ll make the calls and tell them what to do, and they can watch your amazing wizardry in action. But what if they’re the tech? I always try to let them take the reins, but if they pulled the tags off their first uniform yesterday, they’re probably just going to stand there. I give ’em a few beats and then take over (you can’t stand there forever staring at the patient). But between calls, go over what needs to happen, and try to gradually work them toward familiarity with their role.
How will feedback be given? Like in any relationship, communication is only ever bad when it’s not undertaken promptly and directly. From day one, make it clear that if they ever have a question, they should ask it (at the appropriate time); if they’re ever uncertain, they should request assistance (you’ll only be mad when they screw up because they didn’t ask); and if they want help, you want to provide it. Conversely, explain that after calls you’ll give suggestions and feedback, which should be taken constructively; they have a lot to learn and must embrace that. If you tend to adopt a direct or brusque manner, as many of us do, warn them that it’s not personal and you’re not rebuking them, you’re just too old and tired to sugarcoat everything. Reassure them that you’ll never talk shit to others when they mess up; when anybody asks, you’ll just make vague remarks like “oh yeah, he’s good.” Above all, remind them that although you’re here to support them, patient care comes first, so there will be times when “teachable moments” need to take a back seat.

Practice, Practice, Practice

The main problem for most new folks isn’t “knowledge,” it’s application. They may have memorized the EMT textbook (although that book, of course, is a little light), but there are a thousand tiny things that comprise the everyday functioning of this job, and they know none of it.

That’s one of the goals behind Scenarioville. To get good at this job, you need practice. And even in a busy system, in a given week you may only do one or two seizures, or drunks, or chest pains, or any other type of call, with a lot of other stuff in between. If they’re weak with something, it takes a long time to to practice enough to get any better.

You can fill that gap with drills, as realistic as possible. In your downtime, make ’em go through the paces. Trouble giving radio patches? Hand ’em the mic (turn it off first) and have ’em pretend they’re talking to the hospital, complete with pressing the right buttons and hearing static-filled replies from you. Do they need to practice driving? Find a parking lot and give them tasks to accomplish, such as backing in a straight line, turning corners, or navigating tight gaps. Bad at lifting? Give ’em workout homework (get thee to the gym and start deadlifting!). Watched them fumble with a skill? Make ’em do it: take a blood pressure off you (with various locations, sizes, and methods), assemble the nebulizer or apply a dressing, or execute a thorough neuro, abdominal, or trauma assessment. In some cases verbalizing a skill is all you can manage, but whenever possible, do it for real; a disposable neb is a small cost to pay for skill mastery, and the first time they open the package shouldn’t be on a sick person.

If they’re interested, you can certainly chat about deeper medical topics like V/Q mismatching and the citric acid cycle. But they can get that from a book. When it comes to practice, something more interactive is needed. Often, I’ll do verbal scenarios, describing a call and forcing them to make decisions as they go. Nothing is quite as frightening as a totally unscripted, unstructured situation, where you stop and stare and ask, “What do you do?” And don’t let them get away with vague invocations like “scene safety” or “manage the airway”; force them to describe exactly what they mean. Oh, you’ll check for a pulse? How? Where? What are you looking for? Okay, where’s that piece of equipment? How do you size it? Are you sure we’ve got one?

History-taking is the most difficult skill to acquire. Force them to talk directly to you as if you were the patient, because they need to be comfortable with that. With experience, you develop a patter, and you have go-to lines at each juncture — what you say in greeting, what to ask for certain complaints, how to unpack certain responses. They haven’t acquired those moves yet, but they need to develop them, so by presenting them with those situations in a practice setting, they have a low-stress way to hone their own tools.

Every new partner I’ve had has gone through a similar learning curve. At first, they don’t know anything. After a while, the first things they get comfortable with are the “skills,” simple, concrete tasks they know how to execute. As a result, when they walk into a scene and don’t know what to do, they immediately start doing whatever task they’ve mastered — taking a blood pressure, writing down meds, etc. The challenge is getting them to move beyond rote psychomotor skills to the nuanced business of actually approaching the patient, greeting them, assessing them medically with questions and focused physical examination, deciding what’s wrong, and making decisions accordingly. This is tough, and occasionally I’ve had to take things away from people (cuffs, glucometers, nasal cannulas, pens) so they couldn’t “hide” in them.

In the end, the key to mastery is repetition. A single repetition is nothing. When the two of you run a call and you realize they need to practice something, debrief afterward by discussing the details, make them describe the considerations and goals, and spend the rest of the day verbalizing scenarios similar to the call you did. Once they’re absolutely sick of it, you’re starting to make progress, because boredom means they know what to do, and that’s the whole idea.

Managing your own blood pressure

One of the biggest challenges, of course, is not losing your mind.

Even smart students will sometimes drive you out of your gourd. Usually, this is because they don’t know something you figure they should. In fact, everybody should know that. In fact, how in god’s name can you be old enough to drive a car without being able to figure this out? It’s common sense!

The trouble is, it isn’t common sense. When you started out, you had to learn it. But that was so long ago, you’ve forgotten how much you originally had to learn; many of the routine aspects of the job are now second-nature to you. But they’re not second nature to your partner; he has to consciously learn them all, and think about them when he does them, and he can only internalize so many at a time. So while he’s trying to remember to do X, Y, and Z, he might forget A and B. Even if A is something that he does know. And maybe he never even learned C. See?

When they develop confidence, they improve exponentially, because once they relax they can actually think; most dumb stuff is the result of blind panic. (The secret of veteran providers is that they often don’t know what to do, but they use their noodle and do what makes sense. This isn’t a difficult skill, but you can’t do it while holding your breath.)

My own pet peeve is when I tell ’em something, and next week tell ’em again, and six months later I swear I’m telling ’em the same thing, and they’re staring at me like they’ve never heard it. Ain’t you listening to me, Jethro? Well, they are listening. But I’ve also been talking a whole lot, and between the V/Q mismatches and everything else, they’re not going to remember all of it; it’s going in one ear and most of it out the other. So either I can slow the flow a little, or expect to repeat myself. Either way, my problem, not theirs.

The point is that there’s a great deal to learn just to master the basics of this job, never mind acquiring true clinical acumen. Combined with the fact that many new hires are young, and haven’t developed the general problem-solving skills that only come with years and failures and overall life experience (being a good employee, talking to other humans, empathizing with suffering, avoiding dangerous situations, and so on), and you get a perfectly intelligent person who sometimes seems like they’ve had a lobotomy.

Take deep breaths, try to remember what it was like when you were in their shoes… and warn them early that you will occasionally get fed up, sometimes act short, and at the 15th hour of a shift, will not always be gentle Grandpa Patience. Advise them that you’re not perfect and will not always act out the principles you espouse. And request that, although you like to teach and you like your job, when you’ve been working for 60 hours straight you may need some quiet time.

Most of all, look around at all your competent coworkers who once upon a time made their partners pull out their hair and ask whether they were working with a trained monkey. Because it does get better, and years ago, that monkey was you.

Preparation vs. Improvisation

I have a new partner who called me obsessive once.

“Eh?” I asked.

“Everything has to be just so. When you come in you make sure the collars are organized and facing the same direction, you fold over the ends of the tape and stack it in a certain order, you make sure the handles on the bags are easy to grab…”

“I’m not obsessive… have you seen my car?”

“Well, you are here.”

And it’s true. When I show up in the morning, I do my damnedest to ensure that all of our equipment is as stocked, ready, and prepared as possible. I’m the guy who checks the integrity of the air-filled gaskets on the BVM masks, and considers two spare O2 tanks one and one none. If my blood pressure cuffs aren’t labeled, I label them, and I ensure my map book is turned to the correct page.

And all of that may sound funny, because everybody knows that one of the hallmarks of EMS is improvisation, the ability to adapt to unusual situations and “make do.” If you’re juking around at a chaotic scene and discover that you haven’t got any splints, or your stretcher strap is broken, or your patient is dangling over the side of a balcony and needs to be boarded, you see what you have and use your noodle and make it work. Not long ago I saw somebody apply pressure to a laceration on top of a patient’s head by tying a bandage to both stretcher rails and rubber-banding it over their skull like a bow-and-arrow. Why not?

We find a way. So why am I so anal about being prepared while we’re still standing on solid ground?

The fact is, in this job, things are going to go wrong. They just are. And you’re going to handle them the best you can. But if too many things go wrong, the situation may reach a breaking point — your capacity to “adapt and overcome” is not infinite.

Have you ever read a book or watched a show about a major disaster? Plane crashes, reactor meltdowns, bridge collapses. What they have in common is that numerous intelligent people usually foresaw the possibility of such an event, and so they designed systems and safeguards to prevent it from happening. When disaster happens nonetheless, it isn’t because one thing went wrong. It’s because five, six, twelve things went wrong. The backups to the backups to the backups failed. More problems occurred simultaneously than anybody expected..

In this job, too, the only time when feces hit fans is when problems accumulate. It’s not that the patient was sicker than you expected. Or that the stairs were rickety and covered in snow. Those are a nuisance. It goes from whoopsie to trainwreck when you didn’t bring your stairchair and your suction. Then when you go back, the chair falls open while you’re walking, and as you try to fold it you trip over your untied laces, and when you finally get inside you realize the suction canister is missing a cap and won’t hold pressure. And then once you get the patient extricated they’re already unconscious, but you can’t find any Yankauer tips in the truck, and by the time you do they’ve stopped breathing…

See? With this job, even at the best of times, the line between well-in-hand and circling-the-drain can be pretty slim, and once you’re on that slope it’s hard to recover. The only way to stay safely in control is to create a buffer, and that means doing everything you can to prepare yourself when you have the chance, because you won’t always have a chance. If you don’t bother dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s before you enter the mix, then when things inevitably go wrong, the sum of those unhingings may be too much to handle.

Consider your emergency responses. It’s a safe bet that you’re going to drive past the address, or turn the wrong way, or get caught behind the world’s slowest schoolbus. Something is going to cause problems, whether it’s your dyslexic partner who confuses Gable Street with Bagel Street, or you forgetting the apartment number three times in a row. But that’s just a small delay. It won’t be a real problem unless you also stopped to pee before leaving the base, or forgot where your boots were, or had to spend five minutes backing out of where you parked. In that case, you already burned through your margin for error, and now when the unexpected (but inevitable) comes along, you’ve got no slack left.

In short, you can be the best in the world at rolling with the punches, and in this job, you ought to be. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also try to be prepared to the point of obsessiveness. One lays a foundation for the other, and when you habitually have both to work with, you can handle whatever comes your way; if you’ve only got one, you’ll be lucky to get through your shift.

Staying in Place: Compensation and Endpoints

Man’s leaning against a wall. He doesn’t move for hours. Just stands there not moving. Finally, someone says, “You been here all day — don’t you have anything to do?”

“I’m doing it,” he answers.

“Doing what?”

“Holding up the wall.”

And who’s to say he’s not? Maybe he’s working as hard as he can to make sure that wall doesn’t fall down.

In this situation, the man is a compensating mechanism. He is struggling to prevent changes in the wall; keeping that wall upright is an endpoint he cares to maintain, to sustain, to keep intact.

How do we know that the wall isn’t holding up the man? Because we don’t care about the man. Whether he leans or falls doesn’t matter much to anybody. But it would be a terrible thing if the wall collapsed. So we’ll let the man lean or shift in order to prop up the wall when it starts to totter — we’ll use him, adjust him, to compensate for any wall-changes. That’s why he’s there.

If the wall gets weak enough or tilts too far, though, he won’t be able to keep it up. He’ll try, but he’s not infinitely strong, and then maybe the wall begins to tilt or collapses completely. Since we know that under normal circumstances, he’s doing his best to prevent this, if we walk in and see that the wall is tilting, that is not a good sign. It may mean that despite his best efforts, the man has exhausted his strength and is no longer able to resist further wall-changes; or it may mean that, for some reason, the man isn’t doing his job properly. Either way, any further tilting will be unopposed, and will probably happen rapidly and uncontrollably.

Compensators and endpoints

This same dynamic plays out within the human body. As we know, living organisms seek to maintain a certain homeostatic equilibrium. We put our vital metabolic processes in motion and we don’t want them to halt or change, despite any insults or fluctuations imposed upon us by our surrounding environment. So our bodies struggle to keep all of our complex systems at an even keel, using a diverse and powerful array of knobs, dials, and other regulatory tools. Not too hot or too cool, not too acid or too basic, not too fast or too slow. Just right.

The kicker is this, however. Some of our physical parameters are more important than others. In other words, while some parameters have room to adjust, others aren’t negotiable, can’t change much, without derailing our basic ability to function and survive. Things like blood pressure (or at least tissue perfusion, for which blood pressure is a pretty good surrogate measure) are essential to life; your pressure can fluctuate a little, but if it drops too low, you are unquestionably going to suffer organ damage and then die. And yet there are many insults that could potentially lower our blood pressure if we let them: if we bleed a little, or pee a little, or don’t drink enough water, or sweat, or even just stand up instead of sitting down. How do we preserve this vital parameter despite such influences?

By compensating, of course. Our body gladly modulates certain processes in order to preserve other, more important parameters. So in order to maintain blood pressure, perhaps we accelerate our heartrate. In an ideal world, it might be nice if the heart were thumping along at — let’s say — a mellow 80 beats per minute. It’ll use little less energy and less oxygen than if it were beating faster. But it’s really important to keep our blood pressure up, and speeding up the heart can increase the pressure, so we gladly make that trade and induce tachycardia. (Many of these compensatory systems are linked to the sympathetic nervous system, our body’s standard “all hands on deck” response to stress and crisis.)

So imagine we find a patient who’s bleeding and notice that he’s tachycardic, with a normal blood pressure. This suggests a compensated shock; the body is using tachycardia to maintain that normal pressure we see; although his volume is lower than usual, the critical endpoint of adequate blood pressure is still intact.

But what if instead, we found him tachycardic and hypotensive? Well, that’s not good. We see that the body is trying to compensate, but we also see that the important endpoint — blood pressure — is falling nonetheless. The body would never intentionally allow that; BP is too important. So we recognize this as decompensated shock. The hypovolemia has progressed so far, and volume is now so low, that he can’t make up the difference anymore — the compensatory slack has run out — and any further decreases in volume will probably lead to an immediate and unopposed drop in pressure. There’s nothing more the body can do on its own; it’s out of rope.

The skilled clinician — or “homeostatic technician” as Jeff Guy says — uses this predictable progression to understand what’s happening in almost any crisis. Because primary insults are initially covered up by compensatory mechanisms, they may not be immediately apparent, and the earliest and most detectable signs of physical insult are usually nothing more than the footprints of the answering compensation. Thus, when when we encounter those, we know to suspect the underlying problem even if it’s not obvious yet. It’s like seeing brakelights flash from cars on the road ahead; even if you can’t see an obstacle yet, you know people are slowing down for something.

Obvious signs of decompensation usually show up late. Once the primary, underlying problem is revealed by failure of the corrective mechanisms, it’s often progressed so far that it’s too late to address. If you wait to brake until you can see the wreck itself, you might not be able to stop in time.

Two signposts for decompensation

There are two great ways to recognize which signs and symptoms connote decompensation.

The first is to understand which physical parameters are endpoints — which functions the body tries to preserve at all costs. These processes are only compromised as a last resort, so if you see them deteriorate, things are in the end-game; the body doesn’t intentionally sacrifice these for the benefit of anything else.

The second clue is more subtle. In this case, you observe a compensatory mechanism (not an endpoint), but find that it’s no longer successfully compensating — it’s failing, and starting to unwind and scale back, rather than doing its job. The changes in the compensatory system are inappropriate, resulting in less of what we need, not more. This happens when our systems are so damaged that they can’t even fix problems and pursue homeostasis anymore; our infrastructure, maintenance, and repair systems are breaking down. Consider this: we saw how tachycardia could be compensatory, but could bradycardia ever be beneficial in shock? Probably not. So if we found a shocked patient with bradycardia (and likely hypotension, the failing endpoint), we should be very alarmed indeed. There’s nothing helpful, compensatory, or beneficial about bradycardia in the setting of shock, so we recognize that the body would never go there on purpose. It’ll only happen when the machinery itself is falling apart.

Consider, for instance, Cushing’s Triad, the collection of signs often encountered after severe traumatic brain injury, when intracranial pressure has increased enough to squeeze the brain out from the skull like toothpaste. The triad includes hypertension, bradycardia, and irregular or slow respirations. What’s interesting is that, while all are a result of increased ICP, one of these is compensatory, while the others are merely the result of damage. Hypertension is the body’s compensatory attempt to force blood into the brain despite the elevated pressure in the skull. But bradycardia and bradypnea simply result from pressure upon the regulatory centers of the brain tasked with maintaining breathing and heart-rate. That’s why hypertension may be seen earlier, while the other two signs won’t usually manifest until the brain is actively herniating. One signals compensation, the other two decompensation.

Of course, there can be other reasons why compensatory mechanisms might fail, or at least exhibit lackluster performance. Some medications or other aspects of a medical history (potentially unrelated to the current complaint) might throw a wrench in the system. For instance, beta blockers (such as metoprolol and other -olol drugs) limit heart-rate as part of their basic mechanism, so patients with beta blockade often have trouble mustering compensatory tachycardia during shock states. That doesn’t mean they’re any less shocked; in fact, it means they’re more susceptible to hypotension, and that you must be especially on the lookout, because you won’t see one of the red flags (a rapid heart-rate) you might usually expect. Elderly patients with many comorbidities are generally not able to muster up effective compensation for anything, so they can deteriorate quickly, and without much fanfare. Ironically, healthy pediatric patients are the opposite: since they’re so “springy” and smoothly functioning, they compensate very well, with few changes in observable endpoints, until suddenly running out of slack and crashing hard because they’re already so far from shore.

Here are a few important compensatory signs, breakdowns of compensatory systems, and vital physical endpoints:

Appropriate signs of compensation

Tachycardia — increases cardiac output
Vasoconstriction (cool, pale skin) — raises blood pressure
Diaphoresis (sweatiness) — decreases temperature when necessary, but is often just a side effect of sympathetic stimulation
Tachypnea — increases oxygenation, CO2 blowoff, and cardiac preload
Fever — part of the immune system’s response to infection
Shivering — warms a hypothermic body

Inappropriate changes in compensatory mechanisms

Bradycardia — reduces cardiac output, rarely useful in illness; as a chronic finding may be the result of high levels of cardiovascular fitness (in healthy young patients) or medications (in sick old patients); but acutely, it is an ominous finding
Bradypnea — reduces oxygenation, CO2 blowoff, and cardiac preload
Hypothermia (or normothermia when a fever is expected) — suggests a failure of temperature regulation

Inviolable endpoints

Blood pressure — can elevate in stress states, but should not drop below resting levels
Mental status — except in the presence of a drug or similar agent directly affecting cognition, maintaining appropriate alertness and mentation are always a top priority for the body
Blood glucose — kept at normal levels in almost all situations, except when the regulatory systems fail, as in diabetes mellitus
pH — most of the cellular machinery fall apart if significant acidosis or alkalosis occurs
Low O2 saturation or cyanosis — although oxygen saturation can dip briefly without harm, and in some patients (particularly those with COPD, or long-time smokers) it may run low at baseline, a significant acute drop — or the clinical equivalent, which is frank cyanosis — is always inappropriate.

Missing your Manners

“Hi, my name is Brandon. I’m an EMT with Save-a-life Ambulance. Can I help you?”

Anybody remember that? I think it was on page 6 of the EMT textbook.

I suppose it’s about communicating your name, which is nice. And it’s about obtaining consent, which is important, although in reality, consent in EMS is usually handled the same way as consent in sexual activity — you just go until someone says stop.

But mainly it’s about courtesy and professionalism. It’s gauche to swoop into a room and just start playing with somebody’s lesions without so much as a how-do-you-do.

The trouble is that the formal intro is so hokey nobody actually uses it. Or uses anything remotely similar. And I think that’s a shame, because although it’s silly, it’s getting at something important.

We understand that people call us mainly to bring some order to their crisis. Obviously, that involves Doing Medicine. But the medicine is just a means to an end.

Why do we call plumbers? When your sink starts flooding water into the kitchen, you don’t know what to do. This situation is alien; it’s outside of your expertise. You may be very good at many things in life, such as fueling your car, tying your shoes, and making cherries jubilee, but you don’t know what to do about this.

You know that there are people who have the answers, though; they’re called plumbers. So you call a plumber, and say, make it right.

We’re the same way. People don’t know what to do when they get chest pain or crash their car. But they know that if they call 911, professionals will come who know what to do. So they call us. That’s why people sometimes ask 911 to fetch cats out of trees or ask when the circus is coming to town. It’s why the first reaction of so many motorists after a crash is to call their spouse or their dad.

The thing is, when we walk in and our first reaction is to Do Medicine, it’s not helping the problem. All that medicine is just more strangeness, unless your patient is a fellow clinician. So now their distress is going to continue until you can finally tell them what’s wrong. Except you won’t, because you don’t think you’re qualified for that. So now they’ll stay confused and scared until they get to the hospital. And on and on.

Throw them a rope!

The fastest way to restore normality to a situation is to reintroduce a familiar activity. And social courtesies are very familiar to everyone.

When you introduce yourself and shake someone’s hand, they’re transported from the confusing world of a medical crisis to something much more comfortable. They know how to do this. Smile, shake, say your name. It’s easy. They’re good at it.

Sometimes patients are visibly shocked when you do this, and seem to reset; you can literally watch them change channels. Now they’re a little calmer, a little happier, and you can work with that. With enough balls, you can pull this off in the most outrageous circumstances. Sing praise for the EMT who can walk in on the triple traumatic amputation and say “Hi! I’m Jim. What’s going on?”

Now, of course, you don’t want to minimize the patient’s distress. In an emergent situation, it can be galling and obnoxious for their freak-out to be met by your apparent apathy or boredom. That’s why you have to find a middle ground between projecting calm confidence and acknowledging the seriousness (perceived or real) of the patient’s situation. Don’t let them drag you along into panic, but don’t try to abruptly pull them to a halt either; strike a balance, pace them, and then gradually slow them back down. The point is that introducing yourself like a regular person is a powerful tool for restoring normality to a crazy situation: use that tool liberally, but intelligently.

I’ve had patients tell me I was the only Medical Person they could remember introducing themselves. That’s a damned shame. People greet each other and make a introduction when they meet. And aren’t patients people?

Clinical Judgment: How to Do Less

It was around 11:00 AM when we were called to a local skilled nursing facility for a hip fracture. The patient was a 61-year-old male with mild mental retardation and several other issues, who’d fallen last night while walking to the bathroom. He was helped back to bed with moderate hip pain, and the staff physician stopped by to check him out. A portable X-ray was performed, which the physician interpreted as showing a proximal femur fracture as well as an associated pelvic fracture. This was communicated to us via a scrawled note and a cursory report.

The patient was found resting comfortably in bed, semi-Fowler’s and alert. He had no complaints at rest, although his pelvis and left femoral region were mildly tender and quite painful upon movement. No deformity was notable and there was no obvious instability. His vitals were stable and he was generally well-appearing, in no apparent distress. He denied bumping his head and had no pain or tenderness in the head or neck.

We gently insinuated a scoop stretcher underneath him, filled the nearby voids with towels and other linen, and bundled him into a snug, easily-movable package. Then we gave him the slow ride to his requested emergency department, a teaching hospital in town just a few minutes away.

We rolled into the ED and were lifting him into bed on the scoop when a young man entered the room, bescrubbed and serious-looking. I gave a brief report. As the words “pelvic fracture” left my lips, his mental alarms started visibly beeping and flashing, and he hurriedly asked, “What kind of pelvic fracture?”

“We don’t know. All we’ve got is the radiology note, which doesn’t say much.”

“Okay, but pelvic fractures can be a big deal. It could be … ” he sucked in air, “… open-book. There could be a lot of bleeding.”

I stared at him. “Well, sure. But he’s been stable since last night, and has a basically normal physical with no complaints at rest. He’s not exactly circling the drain.”

He didn’t seem to hear me as he briskly approached the patient and began poking him and asking questions. While we pulled our stretcher out of the room, he asked, “Does your neck hurt at all?”

Now that the patient had been stuck on a scoop stretcher for over twenty minutes, he thought for a moment and then shrugged. “Sure.” The doctor immediately ordered the placement of a cervical collar.

As we escaped, he was on the phone to the SNF, and the last thing I heard was him berating them with his urgent need to know exactly what type of pelvic calamity the patient had suffered.

What was the failure here? It was a failure of clinical judgment.

Clinical judgment is a phrase which means different things to different people, and often its meaning is so nebulous (much like “patient advocacy“) that it sounds good while saying nothing. But most would agree that it means something like this: the ability to combine textbook knowledge and personal experience, applying them intelligently to the current patient’s situation to yield an accurate sense of the possible diagnoses and the costs vs. benefits of possible treatments. In other words, it means knowing what the patient’s probably got and what to do about it, which is the heart of medicine anyway. So what’s all the fuss about?

In reality, when clinical judgment is mentioned, what’s often meant is something specific: the wisdom to know when something’s not wrong. Much of medicine is about planning for the worst, ruling out the badness, and looking for the unlikely-but-possible occult killer that nobody wants to miss. As a result, we often act as if nearly everybody is seriously ill, even when they probably aren’t.

On a practical level, most complaints — from chest pain to the itchy toe — could conceivably represent a disaster. Anything’s possible. So if we want to truly adopt perfectly mindless caution, we should be intubating every patient and admitting them directly to the ICU so that we’re ready when their skin melts off and their eyes turn backwards.

But we can’t do that, and we shouldn’t. So how do we know when to do a little less? Clinical judgment.

Clinical judgment is the acumen to assess a patient and say, “I think we’re okay here. Let’s hold off on that.” It’s what you develop when you have both the knowledge and experience to understand that a person is low-risk, and that certain tests or treatments are more likely to harm than to hurt them. That doesn’t mean that nothing will be done, or that more definitive rule-out tests will not occur, but it means you’re not freaking out in the meanwhile. It’s a triage thing.

Put another way, imagine the patient who you’re placing in spinal immobilization, or providing with supplemental oxygen, or to whom you’re securing a splint. They ask, “Look, I don’t much like this; do I really need it?” Well, I don’t know, rockstar — does he? If you’re simply acting on algorithms, reflexively doing x because you found y, then you really don’t know. How important is that oxygen? To answer that, you’d need to truly understand the benefits versus the potential harms, which means having a strong grasp of the mechanism of action, familiarity with the relevant literature (including the pertinent odds ratios, NNT and so forth), prior experience with similar patients, et cetera… only with that kind of knowledge do you really understand what’s happening. In essence, the patient is asking for the informed element of informed consent, something he’s entitled to, and you can’t provide it if you don’t have it yourself.

But when you do develop that depth and breadth of knowledge, you gain a special ability. It’s the ability to do less. When you truly understand what you’re dealing with, and more importantly, what you’re not dealing with, you can titrate medicine to what’s actually needed and stop there. Along with the knowledge comes the confidence, because you don’t merely know, you know that you know; in other words, you don’t need to take precautionary steps merely because you’re worried there might be considerations you don’t understand.

When it comes to withholding anything, even the kitchen sink, you might ask, “isn’t there risk here?” And strictly speaking, there is risk. But you can set that bar wherever you want. The important thing to grasp is that “doing everything for everyone” is not the “safe” approach; overtriage and overtreatment are not benign. All those things you’re doing have a cost. They may cause real harm. Even at best, they cost time and money, and subject the patient to unnecessary discomfort and inconvenience. We’d like to minimize all that whenever possible.

So, we return to the gentleman with the pelvic fracture. Strictly speaking, fracture of the pelvis has the potential to be life-threatening; certain types of unstable fracture can cause massive bleeding, along with damage to nervous, urinary, and other structures. So a textbook response to “pelvic fracture?” might be to treat it as a high-risk trauma.

But a patient with an unstable, severely hemorrhaging open-book pelvic fracture probably wouldn’t look like that. It would be evident; it would cause a number of apparent effects, such as pain and distress, shock signs, altered vitals, deformity or palpable instability. Except in bizarre cases or in patients who are clinically difficult to evaluate, big problems create big changes. While it’s true that we don’t know exactly what the X-ray showed, so one could theoretically argue for any conceivable pathology, there’s no question that the patient appeared stable, had remained unchanged for many hours, and had apparently been judged low-acuity after evaluation and imaging by his own doctor. In other words, let’s take it easy.

The question of spinal immobilization is another example. Strictly speaking, could we rule out the possibility of a cervical spine fracture? Well, no. Not without CT and MRI and even then who knows. But the fall was many hours ago, the patient was freely mobile and turning his head throughout that period, had no peripheral neurological deficits, denied striking his head or loss of consciousness, and quite frankly, had no pain until he spent twenty minutes with his head against a metal board.

It’s not often that you find a doctor more concerned about C-spine than an EMT. How did it happen here?

Despite the fact that we delivered the patient to a major tertiary center, it was nevertheless a teaching hospital, and the new interns had just hit the wards. While this particular clinician was undoubtedly smart and well-educated, at this stage he had about two weeks of experience behind him, and that is not conducive to providing judicious (rather than applied-by-spatula) care. He had neither the experience to know when to take it easy, nor the confidence in that experience to stand by such a decision.

We don’t want to take this concept to its extreme, which would involve doing very little for most of our patients. In the end, this is still emergency medicine, and emergency care will always involve screening for the deadly needle in the benign haystack. There’s also danger in simply becoming lazy and burned-out, and using Procrustean application of cynical “street smarts” to justify never bothering with anything. The real goal is to do the right things for the right reasons, no more, no less. And to get to that point, you have to put in some time.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Diagnosis

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Silver Blaze

We can learn a lot from Sherlock Holmes.

If there’s anybody who better personifies the ultimate diagnostician, I don’t know who. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Holmes canon, was himself a physician and purportedly based his famous detective on Dr. Joseph Bell — who, it was said, could glean a dozen esoteric facts of a patient’s background, history, and complaints from a single glance. (Holmes himself, of course, was not a medical man; that role was played by Watson, the earnest physician who carried his stethoscope wrapped inside his hat.)

Holmes didn’t diagnose illness. Instead, he diagnosed crimes. But the methods were the same, so much so that among the countless fictional characters based upon the Holmesian archetype, some have been crime-solvers (cf. Monk), yet others have been medical doctors (House is the best). Perhaps we shouldn’t model ourselves after the man, who was a single-minded addict and misanthrope, but when it comes to diagnosis — something we can’t escape in medicine — he knows whereof he speaks.

The diagnostic method

Holmes tells us in The Sign of Four that detection involves nothing more than three skills: observation, deduction, and knowledge. Let us consider what he means when faced with, for example, a complaint of chest pain.

Observation: we perceive a middle-aged male, alert and seated upright, rubbing at his sternum with a pained expression. His skin is slightly pale, his respiratory rate is slightly elevated, and he is hypertensive. He complains of “tight” 4/10 chest pain whenever he breathes. Upon auscultation we detect diffuse, bilateral, biphasic wheezing. We note a history of coronary artery disease, diabetes, and COPD.

Knowledge: Chest pain in adults indicates a high risk for acute coronary syndromes. Pallor, tachypnea, and hypertension are consistent with this diagnosis. Sharp, mild, pleuritic pain is not, nor is wheezing, all of which are more consistent with a primarily respiratory etiology. But we also know that MI often presents atypically, particularly in diabetics.

Deduction: Both cardiac (ACS) and respiratory (COPD exacerbation) diagnoses top our differential. An ECG and biomarkers are needed to further evolve the odds.

So what just happened? We observed using our medical assessment — the history, physical, and diagnostic tests — thus yielding a collection of facts and data. We took the set of background knowledge we already possessed, regarding pathophysiology, epidemiology, and hazard ratios, and used it to “fill in the blanks” and provide context to our assessment findings. Finally, we connected the dots together and used deduction to decide what we’re dealing with.

Holmes knew this method well. He might observe your tattered boots, and using knowledge he possessed of typical wear patterns in the various trades, deduce that you make your living as a longshoreman. Simplicity itself.

Why is this a useful model for diagnosis? Because it highlights the fact that these three skills are entirely distinct, though all quite essential. Observation requires skill with the physical exam, the ability to take a nuanced history, the acumen to interpret diagnostics — it’s simply the trait of being aware. (Holmes, succinctly: “Data, data, data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”) Knowledge is knowledge: it’s memorized facts, what you learn in school or from books, and it gives us the basis to understand the raw material we discover in our assessment. Finally, deduction is the mental capacity to analyze, discover patterns, weigh odds, use your imagination, and extract from the vast pool of observation and knowledge the particular pieces that are actually relevant. (Holmes: “… to recognize out of a number of facts which are incidental and which are vital.”)

The hidden danger

Here’s the rub: we’re almost too good at deduction. Humans are excellent at finding patterns in anything. If I leave you my tea-cup for long enough, you’ll undoubtedly find an image revealed in the leaves.

That’s good — but it’s an error. Because there’s not really any image in the tea leaves. But if you’re good at observing details, and have a strong imagination, you’ll still “deduce” many wonderful things from it. Call it apophenia: people want to connect the dots, even when there aren’t any. So we create connections that may be true, but are not always true. We develop stereotypes. Simplifications. False associations.

In medicine, we’re especially prone to this. Because we do know that the human body is interconnected, and that patterns are the rule rather than the exception. Indeed, a large part of developing experience and clinical judgment is increasing your catalog of mental connections. Crackles mean CHF. Irregular pulses mean A-fib. People with Foley catheters have UTIs. Homeless people are drunk. Toe pain is a nonsense complaint. We can’t avoid making the connections, because just like when Holmes examines your boots, those connections are essential to doing our job. But at the same time, we need to learn when to reign them in, or we enter an inescapable diagnostic tunnel after the first moments of patient contact.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

A Scandal in Bohemia

What’s the secret? Knowledge.

Sure, we gather the pieces from our assessment, and we automatically start to connect them together. We can’t help that; patterns jump out at us, we’re natural pattern-finding machines. But using our knowledge, we can look past those simplistic, eye-catching patterns, because knowledge tells us something more subtle: what’s missing.

She’s all false positives. See, that’s the trouble with naturals. They don’t see what’s missing.

Lie to Me, “Moral Waiver”

Okay, Friday night, a “man down” call for a homeless guy on the sidewalk. You’re already thinking: drunk. And the initial observations confirm it: he rouses sluggishly, slurs his speech, and pushes you away as he rolls back over. But then you open the mental box that you filled with this sort of thing in your training, and you reflect: where’s the bottle? And this is a strange spot — it’s cold, wet, public and unsheltered. And come to think of it, is that a medical alert bracelet? We should probably check this guy out a little more. Maybe take his blood sugar, look for any trauma, shake him awake and ask some questions.

The initial pattern recognition is there, but you don’t have to be a slave to it, because you know what else to look for. Even if five clues say one thing, if we don’t see five others that ought to be there, that tells us something different. Pertinent negatives, they call ’em in the business.

Maybe there’s nothing else; maybe the drunk is just drunk. But we’re too smart to make that kind of assumption. Because we know that getting it right doesn’t just mean registering the hits — it means checking off the misses, too.

Holmes would expect no less.

Your High Horse

What happened to kneeling?

People have problems, so they call the ambulance. We arrive and find them — mostly — seated in a chair, or lying in a bed, or perhaps down on the ground. Then we kneel beside them and introduce ourselves. We ask questions, put our hands on them, give medicines, and so on down that clinical flow you learned in school.

Here is what we don’t do: stand six feet away, look down at the patient (and maybe, maybe deign to bend over a little, with our hands on our thighs like we’re admiring a gregarious puppy), and shout in their direction. “Do you want to go to the hospital?” This is not yodeling practice. This is caregiving.

When did we stop kneeling? More and more, this practice seems to be spreading, and it’s reached the point where I can hardly remember the last time I saw one of us kneel beside a patient. Occasionally somebody will kneel to take vitals, but the provider actually speaking and interacting with the sick person still towers over them like a cop chalking off a body.

Yes, yes, I get it. Your knees are bad. I’ve been there. And your back, it’s stiff. You’re not 21 anymore, you can’t go kneeling willy-nilly. Sure.

But we’re not talking about an Olympic sport here, okay? We’re talking about kneeling, at least for a moment, in whatever manner you can successfully perform. At the very, very least, sit down on something so you’re level with the patient. Park your butt beside them on the sofa or pull up a chair.

It’s about patient comfort, because they want to feel like they’re engaging with a fellow human, not yelling up at Rapunzel’s tower. But it’s also about the dynamic it creates between you. As a novice provider, when I first read Thom Dick write about humility, I didn’t understand. But as time passed, it made more and more sense to me (something that happens suspiciously often with Thom’s stuff). Body language says something, not just to others, but to yourself.

When you kneel, you’re saying: I’m here to help. I’m here to serve you. We don’t kneel very much anymore, not in the modern Western world, but we understand instinctively why one would kneel before a king. It’s not in spite of the effort it takes you to get down there, it’s because of it: by making yourself uncomfortable, you’re demonstrating a willingness to put someone else’s needs before your own.

It’s not saying that they’re your master, and you’re not making them the boss of anything. They’re not making you kneel, which is all the difference: it’s a gift, freely given. You’re acknowledging that the patient is important. More prosaically, it’s very much like the relationship that the cashier at Wal-Mart is supposed to have with you (at least in theory). If you met him on his day off, he might cut you off in traffic, flip you the finger, and drive away cackling. But while you buy batteries, at least, it’s his job to help you out. If he’s lucky, he enjoys doing that; if he’s not, he feels forced into it because he wants to keep his paycheck. We’re in a different boat, though, because our obligation doesn’t come from a boss looking over our shoulder. It comes from the fact that we accepted a duty (perhaps sacred, perhaps mundane, but a duty either way) — that when someone calls 911 and asks for our help, we’ll come and serve them. That makes us servants, and not in a bad way.

Something different happens when you refuse to lower yourself before a patient. It tells everyone in the room, including the patient and especially including yourself, that although you’re here, and although you might perform the clinically-indicated medical treatment, you’re not putting yourself out at all. Drive-by care is all you’re willing to offer. It’s like telling the patient: “Just to be clear, we were in the area anyway, and I thought you might have some snacks.”

I have great respect for police, and we work alongside them often. But their business is very different from ours, and it highlights the dangers in conflating the role of EMS with that of public safety. The job of a caregiver is to serve. The job of a cop is to enforce. It means they have to elevate themselves — you can’t exert authority unless you’re coming from a place of some kind of superiority (legal, moral, even physical). It means they have to judge. I don’t know if they enjoy it, and I do know that it’s highly necessary. But it takes a different kind of person, or at least a different kind of thinking, to judge people than it takes to serve them. Try to imagine a cop kneeling, or helping to wipe Mrs. Smith’s bottom. Now imagine yourself wearing aviators, crossing your arms and leaning against the wall while you bark at her, and understand that it’s just as misplaced.

What’s funny is that when you accept this “lesser” role, you can find an awful lot of meaning in it, because it’s a privileged place too. The privilege isn’t something you exert over others: rather, it’s freely granted to you by the patient. When they see that you’re here to help them, they give you permission to enter their home, to touch their body, to ask them the most intimate questions. This is essential, because you need that access to do your job (and it’s why I believe that mixing EMS and law enforcement would mean a major blow to our ability to treat people). But it’s still a gift. And I think that’s worth something. Even sore knees.