Ever seen The Matrix?  It’s one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen.  The folks who created the movie and that entire universe are definitely creative, if not a bit warped.  But there’s a scene in there that applies to EMS.

In the first Matrix movie, Morpheus offers the protagonist Neo a choice.  “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

The allegory applies to EMS as well. At some point in your EMS career, hopefully early along, you’re offered the choice of the red pill or the blue pill.  You may not even realize you’re being offered this choice, but it’ll happen nonetheless.

For EMS, if you take the blue pill, you’ll be perfectly happy with “meets minimum standards.”  You’ll be able to juggle the inherent contradictions the average EMS provider believes that “we do everything a doctor does, but at 80 miles per hour” and “we don’t diagnose.” (By the way, that’s EXACTLY what doctors, as well as any other clinician, do — diagnose.) You’ll believe that the less than 200 clock hours of training to become an emergency medical technician (EMT) represents a significant level of professional achievement and that such a level of “achievement” qualifies you to “save” your paramedic partner regularly.  In short, you’ll become blissfully ignorant and perfectly happy working the dialysis shuffle and keeping the EMT t-shirt manufacturers in business.

OR…. you can take the red pill. You can learn evidence based medicine.  You can learn the science behind what we do.  You can begin to understand the outside factors that impact EMS — law, politics, and policy.  God forbid, you might even understand that there’s no one single bullet that will fix all of EMS’s problems.  We’ve tried EMS 2.0; we’ve tried “community paramedicine;” and now we’re on the “EMS needs degrees” kick. Truth is — we probably need all of those things to make EMS great again.  And probably some more things need to happen to truly fix EMS.  BUT, you have to be willing to accept the knowledge and education.

Pardon the change in allegory here, but when the snake offers you the forbidden fruit with the gift of knowledge and you eat it, you open your eyes.  And to add one more allegory, you might even see that the emperor has no clothes.

Somewhere along the way in my EMS career, I was fortunate enough to be around some educated and wise folks in prehospital medicine who offered me the red pill and the forbidden fruit.  I opened my eyes and realized that this is the practice of medicine and that it’s a constantly growing field whose only certainty is the growth of that which we don’t know.  I learned to embrace nuance.  I learned to embrace learning.  I think I’m better for it.  And I’d like to hope that some of my patients are better for it.

What would’ve happened had I chosen to take the blue pill and remain complacent, ignorant, and blissful? I’d have been “happy” riding an engine as the token EMT at a volunteer fire department that ran 1-2 calls a shift and where learning wasn’t encouraged. Ignorance would have been bliss.

But would I have truly grown?  Nope.

Do I have regrets?  I absolutely do at times. There are times when doing the right thing isn’t easy. There’s also knowing when to pick your battles.  Anyone who knows me knows that’s a continuing challenge for me. Would I take the same choice again?  Also, yes.

For each of you, there’s a choice each day you practice prehospital medicine.  I hope that you take the choice to stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.  You, your patients, and our profession will all get better.

It’s time for another one of my trademarked and patented rants on what’s wrong with EMS.  And to keep with the social media crowd, I’ve been triggered.

This afternoon, I received an email from a large, national EMS conference (cough, EMS World Expo, cough) promoting a “Complex Coordinated Terrorist Attack Workshop.” The add-on course, at an added expense of course, includes managing an active shooter incident combined with a hazmat/explosive scenario.  On a similar note, an EMS organization in my neck of the woods is working on a mass casualty scenario involving hostages, improvised explosive devices, and a firefighter down — all in one scenario that’s expected to span an entire day of training.

Right now, “tactical” and “terrorism” sell seats, especially for paid training.  I get that.  I also get that we need to train for events that are unlikely to occur, but have high risk if they do occur.  But for love of Pete, can we stop already with doing training just because it sounds sexy or cool?

If we’re going to train on a mass casualty, how about training on something that’s actually likely to occur in most EMS organizations’ service areas?  A MCI involving a school bus is much more likely to happen than a dirty bomb or an active shooter.  And if you factor in getting the right patients to the right hospitals, the logistics of parental involvement, or even factoring in road closures, this MCI becomes a real (and realistic) challenge.  Besides, if we’re truly following the National Incident Management System and the Incident Command System models as required by FEMA, the type of incident shouldn’t matter.  NIMS and ICS are what we should be using for command and control of any emergency incident.

Meanwhile, EMS providers can’t perform a basic assessment or master the skills associated with their certification level, let alone understand pathophysiology or pharmacology. And we have raised a whole generation of providers who think claims of PTSD and burnout are what constitutes experience.

I get that conferences need to sell to the masses if they’re to remain a going concern. I also know that we’ve got a bigger problem with our profession (or what passes for it) and our personal standards if this is who we’re marketing for. While we have people getting excited over this stuff, we still have all levels of providers clinging to dogma.  We have people still putting patients on backboards.  We have supposed advanced providers thinking all respiratory ailments are treated with an albuterol inhaler.  And let’s not even talk about the people who think that “pasta water” (IE, saline) fixes hypovolemia and scoff at the notion of administering blood products outside the hospital.

Yes, there are public safety aspects to EMS.  I will NEVER deny that.  But we’re also engaged in the clinical practice of medicine.  We need to quit playing at being “operators” and start actually being clinicians.

And truth be told, I know a few actual “operators” in the field of prehospital medicine.  The overwhelming majority of them rarely talk about being operators. They do talk about the medicine — all the time.

Finally, if we think that some more “tacti-cool” scenarios are what’s needed to advance EMS as a profession, that alone is a statement of why EMS is where it is. Not to mention why we’re not advancing and why the salaries are so low.

Sorry for the interruption in my usual stream of consciousness blogging.  Nothing in particular has been on my mind as of late. (Although I may have to do a post in the near future about finding a potential unicorn.  Namely, a fire department that embraces both volunteers and ALS first response.)

But this morning, I saw a contrast between those who I’d call high speed EMS providers and those who, at best, deserve the title “ambulance driver.”

Example one.  Discussion about the risks and benefits of a particular prehospital intervention.  In this case, it was application of a pelvic binder.  An expert on trauma care provides their opinion and an article that includes citations. Learning and dialogue occur.

Example two. Discussion of prehospital ultrasound on a popular EMS social media page.  Truth be told, I’m still a skeptic on prehospital ultrasound.  I’m not sure what ultrasound can show me that a good patient assessment can AND change my course of care in the prehospital setting. But another EMS provider (and I won’t use the word professional) stated in said discussion, ” I guess when you’re burn out like me, it doesn’t matter any more and you just want to dump the pt in the er. However that’s mine own opinion.”  He then “doubles down on dumb” and goes on to state, “nope it’s my opinion, not ignorance. I jill just don’t care about those devices out in the field. Waste of time and money.”  When he’s challenged on his ignorance, he states, “It’s not an excuse, it’s just how I feel about being burn out. I believe we have differences in opinions and I respect that. I guess opinions are wrong to use. People have different opinions and has nothing to do with education.”

The truth is simple. You can have an opinion. But when your opinion is based upon bad information and beliefs and you refuse to change when given new information, then you are absolutely wrong. And if you’re basing your medicine on bad opinions, then you’re a bad provider.

So long as EMS tolerates those people who refuse to practice good medicine based on current evidence based practice because they “have a different opinion,” we’re going to remain the ambulance drivers.  We won’t be taken as a profession.  And until we step up the standards to be a clinician, regardless of what EMS does for educational standards (which may or may not fix things), we don’t deserve to be called a profession.

You’re entitled to an opinion.  You can be wrong.  But you’re not entitled to harm a patient because you choose to be wrong.  If you are still doing that, that’s why the legal profession exists.