Respiratory Therapy 101: Just Keep Breathing

It’s my day off today, which means I don’t have any intriguing stories to tell you. So instead of coming up with my own original content, I will hijack the content of another blogger.

Panda Bear MD has written an interesting piece about the way things are perceived and operated in the Emergency Room. Often, we wind up flinging lots of resources and time at totally hopeless cases instead of focusing on the less glamorous but more salvageable patients. Dr. Bear uses the example of a young man shot in the heart versus a young woman bleeding out through her tonsils. What typically happens is that everybody on earth goes to see the hopeless young man die in a fantastic way while ignoring the more salvageable young girl who has an unexciting, unglamorous condition. Not only does this happen in the ER, it happens in the ICU environment also. The sad truth is that we often focus so much on the hopeless cases simply because we get to use cool toys on them, while the less exciting cases become rote and boring, so we ignore them until they become hopeless, at which point we can once again use our cool toys. It’s an endless cycle, and it amazes me that so few people notice or care.