The term “Special Healthcare Needs” means different things to different people. Collectively, patients with special healthcare needs encompasses the geriatric, bariatric, pediatric, sensory impaired, technologically dependent patients, behaviorally challenged patients and many others. Every group has special challenges, risk factors and needs as well as the fact that our approach to them as health care providers [...]
As a medical professional, have you ever wondered why we have to do a CPR refresher class every two years? It seems like you just took the class, and now it’s time to do it again. While in the class, you might even be thinking “this is the exact same information from two years ago”. Well, [...]
Morphine, Dilaudid, Fentanyl… these are medications that we have been giving our patients for years, to treat their pain. Chest pain, give an opioid. Broken bone, give an opioid. Abdominal pain, give an opioid. Back pain, give an opioid. For many years, these were our only pain medication options in an ambulance. That is finally starting [...]
In the medical profession, it is not unthinkable that we might have to triage people during a mass casualty incident, or MCI. From multi-vehicle car crashes, mass shootings, terroristic attacks, and even weather-related incidents, such as tornados, earthquakes, or hurricanes. Within just a matter of moments, we can easily become overwhelmed by patients, all begging for [...]
The body’s Nervous System is a very complex system that controls all functions of the body from purposeful movement to regulation of homeostasis and everything in between. We will be dividing it into the Central nervous System (CNS) and the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) for the purposes of this discussion. These two subdivisions [...]
ASD-If you meet just one person on the Autism Spectrum, you’ve met only one person on the Autism Spectrum Donald Gray Triplett. (Born September 8, 1933, Forest, Mississippi, U.S.—died June 15, 2023, Forest, Mississippi), American male who was the first person diagnosed with autism. His parents, unable to cope with some of his developmental delays, committed him [...]
As medical professionals, when we are assessing our patients, one of the most common questions that we ask, is “what medications are you taking?” A lot of medics think that we only need to know about prescriptions medications, but this is not true. We need to know all of the patient’s prescription medications, all of their [...]
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a diagnosis that has been around for a very long time but is becoming increasingly more common for emergency medical services personnel to encounter. Quality of care and correct care comes down to having a basic understanding of ASD. Autism spectrum disorder is a disability that causes delays in communication, social [...]
Updating the stroke assessment Direct percutaneous puncture of the cervical carotid artery remained the primary technique unto the 1960s to visualize intracranial blood vessels until Seldinger’s technique was introduced in 1953. This was a diagnostic procedure after the stroke or TIA (Varon, Varon, & Nyman, 2007) I was employed as a Radiologic Technologist (X-ray tech) in [...]
Are you pulling my leg? -femur fractures The Thomas splint was first introduced by Hugh Owen Thomas in 1875, in his book titled, Diseases of the hip, knee and ankle joints with their deformities, treated by a new and efficient method. Across the western front, the splint was adopted and by 1917, it had become standard issue [...]
