Stop Cooling Those Burns

Do you ever get the feeling that everything you learned in EMT class was wrong? If you haven’t yet developed that feeling, then you probably haven’t been around long enough. Stick around. Sooner or later (depending on whether or not you are paying attention) you’ll start to feel that every treatment guideline you ever learned was somehow flawed. I’ve been in EMS education long enough now to start to feel that everything I ever taught was wrong. Such is medicine. And now I’m going to throw another curve ball at you. Do you remember when we told you to aggressively flush burns with copious amounts of sterile water? Yeah, well…um, stop doing that too. I’m sorry. We were apparently wrong about that. I know. It runs counter to everything we taught you, right? I agree. I learned about aggressively cooling burns over two decades ago in my EMT class. Stop the burning process and then cool the burn by flushing it with copious amounts of water. Keep flushing until you arrive at the hospital. Years later the treatment guideline backed off a bit on the flushing. We started emphasizing stopping the burning process and also warned students to guard the burn patient against hypothermia. It seemed that our aggressive cooling techniques were delivering a ridiculous percentage of burn patients to the hospital mildly hypothermic. Hypothermia is apparently not conducive to healing in the burn patient population. I was just as guilty as anyone of pouring ...
Source: The EMT Spot - Category: Ambulance Crew Authors: Tags: Knowledge Skills slider Source Type: blogs