Accept nothing at face value

Now we know the identity of Ambulance Driver. His name is Kelly Grayson. His karma ran over your dogma, as he writes about medical knowledge here.

"Half of what is taught in medical school is wrong, but nobody knows which half." ~ Lucy Hornstein, MD

And you know, dogma may sometimes serve a greater good. The dictionary also defines dogma as "a doctrine or body of doctrines concerning faith or morals formally stated and authoritatively proclaimed by a church."

Grayson quotes noted philosopher Hub McCann from the movie Second Hand Lions

"Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most; that people are basically good, that honor, courage and virtue mean everything, that power and money… money and power… mean nothing, that good always triumphs over evil, and that true love never dies . Doesn't matter if it's true or not. A man should believe in those things… because those are the things worth believing in."

The problem, Grayson explains, is that we sometimes place

more value on the wording of our moral code than on its intent.

And when that happens, it's time to abandon the dogma – medical or religious.

If I have another heart attack, I want someone like Grayson to be driving that ambulance. He lists things that he was taught that did not turn out to be valid. However, his professors did do one thing right:

But the most useful thing they passed along to me in training was what they didn't do. They didn't discourage me from questioning them, and they didn't require one specific approach to a problem. They taught me that as our knowledge expands, the more we realize how little knowledge we actually have.

In short, they let me keep a flexible mind. That alone has served me better in my career than anything written in a textbook. It allowed me to become a medic with twenty years of experience instead of a medic with one year of experience, repeated twenty times.

Accept nothing we have been taught at face value, most especially those things that we feel to be true. If our profession is to advance, we need to identify the things we do well, the things we don't do well, and recognize the lies we have been telling ourselves.

It's not necessary to completely abandon our faith in EMS.

But it is our professional obligation to question it.