What Time Should You Check Your Blood Pressure?
ConclusionBest Time To Check Blood Pressure
Many experts recommend that you check your blood pressure at least twice a day. This could be once in the morning and again at night.
Doctors normally suggest checking your blood pressure at least twice a year. But there are other times when it may be worth checking.
If you have anxiety or experience high blood pressure episodes lasting more than two hours.
If you have shortness of breath, chest pain, rapid heart rate, sweating, lightheadedness, nausea or vomiting, consult your doctor immediately.
Choosing A Time That Works For You
You can check your blood pre...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 11, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Michael Kutryk Tags: Guides Blood Pressure Source Type: blogs
Isolated Systolic Hypertension: Causes, Treatments, and More
ConclusionWhat Is Isolated Systolic Hypertension?
If you have isolated systolic hypertension, your systolic blood pressure (the top number in the BP reading) is high, but your diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) is normal.
Stages of Isolated Systolic Hypertension
Normal BP: 120/80 mmHg
Elevated BP: 120-129/80 mmHg
Hypertension Stage 1: 130-39/80-89 mmHg
Hypertension Stage 2: 139 mmHg />89 mmHg
Isolated systolic hypertension is more common in older adults. This condition is also more prevalent in men than women. Untreated isolated systolic hypertension can lead to serious health prob...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 11, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Michael Kutryk Tags: Guides Blood Pressure Source Type: blogs
Does Blood Pressure Change During a Heart Attack?
Want to know “Does blood pressure change during a heart attack? This comprehensive guide will help obtain a clear picture of the steps to eliminate its chances.
When a person is facing the condition of a heart attack, the pressure in their blood vessels can rapidly change and can have devastating consequences if left untreated.
However, in some cases, it doesn’t. Therefore, the discussion surrounding BP fluctuations during a heart attack is limited because most doctors don’t use it as an indicator of a heart attack.
While it’s possible to see such changes, some other warning signs of a heart attack are...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 11, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Michael Kutryk Tags: Guides Blood Pressure Source Type: blogs
What Is Blood Anyway?
A few years ago I had a great opportunity to write an article series for EMS Magazine called Blood On Tap. It was all about the pioneering work being done by different pharmaceutical groups to create artificial substitutes for blood.
The technical name for the pharmaceutical products that mimic the properties of blood is “oxygen therapeutics.” Here’s the inside scoop, directly from the drug company big wigs, on why we don’t call them something cool like artificial blood.
The thing is, the drug company’s know full well that these fancy solutions are nowhere near advanced enough to mimic the many complex...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
4 Questions to Help You Succeed In EMT Class
I was searching around on Twitter today for tweets using the acronym “EMT”. I was struck by how many EMT students were discussing their current trials and tribulations with EMT class on twitter. EMT students talk with each other about EMT class differently than they talk to me about it. Perhaps because I’m the instructor they downplay how difficult the curriculum can be.
Maybe they don’t want to be honest and show vulnerability to me since I also evaluate them on test days. Or perhaps they don’t want to seem like the class is to much for them. I talk with students about my views o...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
What Is Epinephrine?
A quick inside tip on field instructors; we all have our favorite questions to ask new riders. Those questions that help us get a more firm understanding of where our students knowledge base rests. What kind of practical knowledge are they carrying out into the field? Some of them are fair questions. Some of them aren’t. That’s life.
One of my favorite questions to ask that new rider early in the ride along is, “So what is epinephrine anyway?” (For the record, this is an extremely fair question.) I’ve found this to be a telling conversation because the scope of the question gives the student a l...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
What Is The Good Samaritan Law?
The term “Good Samaritan” comes from the gospel of Luke. In the parable told by Christ, a Samaritan helped a Jew who had been beaten and robbed. At the time, the Samaritans and Jews were mortal enemies. Through the parable, Jesus attempts to redefine what it means to be a good neighbor.
Reading some recent conversations on the good Samaritan law in a few online forums, I’m reminded not of the biblical parable, but of the parable of the six blind men describing an elephant. Remember that one? One guy feels the side and thinks an elephant is like a wall, the other feels the tail and thinks an ele...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
Types of Brain Hemorrhage
In our last post (part one) we introduced the subject of head injuries with an overview of trauma patterns typically found in head injury patients. Today let’s talk about bleeding inside the skull or intracranial hemorrhage.
Brain hemorrhage occurs when blood vessels inside the skull rupture. There are some non-traumatic causes as well. Ruptured aneurysms and hemorrhagic strokes would be a few examples of non-traumatic intracranial hemorrhages.
We classify bleeding in the skull by location, using the layers of the meninges as a guide. You may recall from EMT class that the meninges are fluid coated membranes that s...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
Treatment of Head Injury
In our last two installments we looked at the way heads get injured and the various ways the brain tends to bleed. In this, our last installment in the head injury series, let’s take a look at basic treatment and management of the head injury patient.
There are a lot of variables that need to be considered when managing a head injury patient in the prehospital environment. Your treatment will be guided by considerations like the mechanism and severity of the head injury, other associated injuries, the patients mental status and their basic stability.
These are some guidelines when sizing up and prioritizing your ca...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
What Is GHB Anyway?
Let’s face it, there are a whole bunch of street drugs out there that we as EMS caregivers should understand. While we can’t always be expected to identify the exact drug a patient has ingested. We do need to be able to predict a given drugs effect on the body.
We should also be able to take a fair guess at the identity of an ingested drug based on our evaluation of the patient’s physical presentation. GHB is one of those drugs that can be hard to nail down based on the physical signs. But it does leave some clues – if you know what your look for.
What Is It? : A Multi-Receptor Stimulant
GHB is short for ...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
Beyond The 1-10 Pain Scale
How bad does it hurt? I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that this is, quite possibly, the most common question we ask in EMS. And it can be a difficult question to answer. How bad compared to what? How do we reconcile the patient with significant pain who winces and says it only hurts a little. Or what about the patient who is relaxed and seemingly comfortable while reporting the worst pain they have ever felt?
Not everyone feels pain the same way. Some patients feel pain more than others. And, perhaps even more significant, some patients fear pain more than others. What’s a clinician to do?
You and I aren...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
Wrong Medicine
Some of the stacks of trip reports were nearing four feet high and they filled the musty closet. Dividing them up, we started sorting through them in earnest. The dates indicated that the calls had been run between 1972 and 1978. Most of the narratives were as brief as the treatment lists.
Hall Ambulance’s station one was an older house in an early residential area of Bakersfield, California. It had been, at one time, the residence of the company’s owner, Harvey Hall. In the early days of the ambulance service, Harvey had both lived in the home and run his fledgling ambulance service out of it.
One of the crews s...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
Written Protocol vs. Common Sense
Steve Valdez only wanted to cash a check. In retrospect it seems so simple. The check was written to him from his wife’s account at Bank of America. He had two forms of ID, both with photos. The address on the drivers license was the same as the ID on the check (printed by Bank of America.) Bank of America thought differently.
Here’s the rub. B of A has a written policy that states if you don’t have an account at their bank you need to leave a thumbprint. You’ve probably seen those by now. Either you dab your thumb in an ink blotter or you use the fancy thumb scanner. But Steve Valdez doesn’t have any arms. An...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 10, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
To Walk or Not To Walk?
The Happy Medic (THM) recently posted a fantastic topic on his blog. I love diving into controversial decisions that we have to make every shift. Here’s one of those questions that we need to answer on just about every call. Should we walk the patient to the pram or carry them?
This is one of those things that we have no choice but to address in every system on just about every call. How to we get the patient to the pram? When is it OK to walk them?
It seems like this subject got rolling on Justin’s (THM) blog when EMS types from around the country started sending him feedback about his role in the documenta...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 9, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
Should You Go To Jail For Medical Errors?
I’m not looking to give a lecture or deliver a lot of input on this one. I’m really uncertain how I feel about this and I’d like To hear what you all think.
What do you all think about medical caregivers receiving jail time for medical errors that contribute to bad patient outcomes? It’s not just conjecture. We have two recent cases on the books now of medical practitioners facing jail time for mistakes they made on the job.
First there was Julie Thao, the nurse who faced felony manslaughter charges for administering a high dose anesthesia to a pregnant 16 year old female (she thought it was a prescribed anti...
Source: The EMT Spot - November 9, 2022 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Steve Whitehead Tags: EMT Source Type: blogs
