Friday, August 24, 2007

New Medical Equipment

As I said before, I was trained in the art of medicine many decades ago. We were taught to use a stethoscope, percuss chests and abdomens, plunge faces into ice water to stop SVT and many tools and cures rarely seen today. I do think that some of the newer tools available to us today are wonderful. Tonight we used one of those tools in my ED..

This is one that has some degree of controversy, but I still love it. It is particularily useful in those "Haldol" allergic patients. It's result is predictable, immediate, and very satisfying to to deploy. Some of you may have seen it. The Tazer!

What an elegant tool! It immediately calms the "upset", the "intoxicated", or just the down right obnoxious! And is so much fun to watch!

I hope all of you get to use this tool sometime..Time for some shuteye!

12 comments:

  1. i wish we had tazers here. they did at the last facility at which i worked.

    it came in handy one night when a giant went berserk in the ED. turns out this particular giant had a schizophrenic break at age twenty three. his job at the time was offensive lineman in the NFL.

    he was 6 foot 8 and 380 pounds and had been out of football for two years. he was seeing monsters and thought we were witches and there was no way any of us or any combination of us were going to take him down to give him haldol. to the rescue came the tazer. "pop-pop-pop" and down he went.

    six of us lifted him onto the gurney and his legs came off the end by 7 inches or so. we also couldn't put the bedrails up because he was so massive at the chest and abdomen that he came off at both edges.

    poor guy. terrible disease. the tazer, likely, saved his life, as we probably would have had to shoot him or beat him down with night-sticks as he really wanted to kill us and easily could have.

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  2. I would be on the receiving end,I haven't got tazered yet.
    Would it cure my Wolff-Parkinson-White?

    911 doc
    "he was seeing monsters and thought we were witches". Wow, you got some amazing psychic powers to see others thoughts. Maybe he didn't like being in jail? How do convicts see their guards? and you do have those magic potions, so how far off was he?

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  3. mark,
    he was not under arrest nor did he come from jail. he called the nurses 'witches' and kept yelling to 'keep the monsters away' so it really had nothing to do with psychic powers.
    cordially.

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  4. Mark

    Perhaps he the patient said "get these monsters and witches off me!". That's possible, huh? Obviously, drugs first-I like geodon in high doses-, (just to keep them quiet and still, and not upset the little man whose wife died or the frightened injured child) but sometimes you can't get close enough. In those cases, taser is an option. I'm not going to risk injury or wish it on my staff, even though there are many nights I would rather be at home collecting disability than deal with one more f**ked up social/drug situation or person who through a series or foreseeable choices/events wound up in the ED ("I was just walking through crack alley taking these pies to the nuns for the charity bake off and two dudes jumped me and put a crack pipe in my mouth and made me smoke it")

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  5. heh-heh. The tazer cures many ills ! :)

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  6. dear mark,
    i just read your blogs. could you please clean the screen on your computer? it's very hard to see you as dirty as it is.

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  7. Welcome, Oldfart.
    I have actually USED plunging my face in a big bowl of ice water to stop PATs! I haven't had one since I gave up caffeine and my 2nd husband, but when I had them they were terrible. And I'm sure I date myself by calling them PATs instead of SVTs...but then again, I figure...what's REALLY above the Ventricles besides the Atria {i}? I may have only had 1 yr of college biology, but I remember that much.

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  8. Oh, and as someone who appreciates modern psychotropics...Mark, take your vitriol elsewhere. When a VIOLENT psych patient is endangering or even upsetting those around him, in a PUBLIC place, that patient needs to be sedated as quickly as possible.

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  9. If someone is violent/out of control they should be in a metal bar and cement prison, not an ED.

    I wrote
    "Maybe he didn't like being in jail? How do convicts see their guards? and you do have those magic potions, so how far off was he?"

    This was a JOKE, not funny?

    "Mark, take your vitriol elsewhere"

    When a VIOLENT psych patient is endangering or even upsetting those around him, in a PUBLIC place, that patient needs to be sedated as quickly as possible."

    It is NOT a PUBLIC place, if he/she mental patient can't leave.

    I do empathize with your position and wrote the same advice to mental patients (to be quiet in the ED) on my blog.

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  10. 911: I take it back. You can do subtle. That was good.

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  11. We don't have tazers, but one of the best things ever was watching a doctor, white coat and all, do a flying clothesline to catch an out-of-control psych patient before he made it out the door.

    Not to be confused with the same doctor doing the rarely-used precordial thump when someone went into V-tach while he was standing there...and having it work...while standing next to a code cart...

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  12. "And I'm sure I date myself by calling them PATs instead of SVTs...but then again, I figure...what's REALLY above the Ventricles besides the Atria {i}?"

    Not so much a difference in anatomy as it is in pathophysiology, HollyB.

    Although they're both two very generic terms used to describe two very specific problems.

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