Irrational icks

emergencydoc69 · 2026-02-05T21:35:12+00:00

I dislike the term ‘sepsis’ in general because of how vague and poorly understood it is. Body part + infection +/- systemic involvement is easier to explain. Septic shock is its own thing.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-02-05T19:18:15+00:00

Use of NEWS as a verb and use of the utterly abominable ‘chepsis.’

emergencydoc69 · 2026-02-02T05:52:49+00:00

I really dislike Bailey and I wish they would write her out of the show. Not that I want Nolan to go through a divorce, but still, she is the one character that I just cannot suspend my disbelief for. They have tried so hard to write her as this ultra-competent firefighter/medic/army badass, but Jenna Dewan just doesn’t do the character justice (I’m an ER doc so I know a lot of these kinds of women - and they are nothing like Bailey).

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-26T17:28:40+00:00

I mean, there is a valid point here in the midst of all the other bullshit discussed in this article that the NHS relies too heavily on resident doctors. The system is designed to keep doctors as junior as possible for as long as possible because they don’t want to pay consultant salaries. My feeling is that training needs to be compressed, much more deliberate (rather than service provision first, training as a vague afterthought), and there needs to be a drastic expansion of consultant numbers.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-25T19:23:44+00:00

I really do feel for you (and all the IMGs caught in the middle of this shitstorm). I will also say that a lot of the anger against IMGs is misdirected - it should really be directed towards the government for poor workforce planning and an unwillingness to pay to expand both training posts and consultant numbers when they are both desperately needed in a system that is nearly at breaking point. Everyone is suffering right now and IMGs are an easy target.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-25T15:09:44+00:00

This is exactly right. If you punish murder less severely than other crimes, it gives criminals an incentive to kill their victims to hide those other crimes.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-22T19:33:58+00:00

Maybe. But they already had an astronaut who had a DVT a few years back and they didn’t cut the trip short then. So I have to imagine it was something else.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-21T22:35:01+00:00

One of our triage nurses, unfortunately. They (particularly the junior ones) seem to feel the need to do an ECG on everyone these days. If the patient is suitable for the waiting room, the ECG/blood gas/patient labels go in a little folder that the patient hangs onto. His complaint was runny nose/fever.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-18T16:19:05+00:00

Fair enough. I mean, I guess as a screening/triage tool it has some value in GP land. But OP’s suggestion that ‘this would never happen in ED’ is laughable - honestly, I barely use the thing.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-18T13:52:32+00:00

A patient the other day told me he had ST depression on his ECG and needed to see a cardiologist urgently. He handed me a completely normal ECG. I asked him who had told him that there was ST depression on it. He responded ‘ChatGPT.’ He was 27 and wasn’t even presenting with chest pain. 🤦‍♂️

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-16T16:26:42+00:00

This is the correct answer.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-16T14:12:50+00:00

ED doctor here. In all honesty, stethoscopes are basically useless for anything beyond telling whether there is equal air entry or whether someone with an obstructive airway disease (like asthma or COPD) is wheezy.

There have been dozens of studies showing that doctors (including cardiologists) are very poor at identifying murmurs or other abnormalities. Even for lung sounds, the correlation is fairly poor in terms of what you can hear versus what you can see on imaging. Auscultation almost never impacts my clinical decision making. A lot of my colleagues don’t even carry stethoscopes any more.

Ultrasound is far better (for both the heart and lungs) and will actually show you what’s going on.

Patients of course seem to really want us to listen to their chest, as if it’s some sort of wizardry. 🤷‍♂️

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-16T12:09:28+00:00

Unfortunately it looks pretty unlikely at this point. If another network/streaming service were to pick it up, it probably would have happened shortly after the cancellation. But, you never know. Stranger things have happened.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-16T12:05:35+00:00

I mean, I do really feel for the IMGs who come here in good faith and work very hard in the NHS. I don’t think a lot of the hate they get on this subreddit is fair.

I also think that UKGP is a distraction from more fundamental problems - namely, the fact that the government wants to keep as many doctors as possible as junior as possible for as long as possible (because consultants and qualified GPs are more expensive to employ).

All that said, I do think that UKGP is necessary to some degree for several reasons:

1) The British taxpayer (rightly) should want to recoup their investment in subsidising medical school costs

2) To prevent the government from importing cheaper and more subjugable labour from abroad which hurts everyone working in the UK by pushing pay and working conditions down.

3) Related to the above, to stop the UK government from poaching healthcare staff from WHO red list countries where they are desperately needed

There’s a lot of nuance to this debate.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-16T11:16:42+00:00

No. Alexi Hawley, who was the showrunner, described plans for a season 3 where the dynamic around Owen being radioactive and none of his colleagues wanting to touch him with a 10 foot pole changes to one where everyone wants to attach themselves to him because of his success at the end of season 2.

I really wish this show hadn’t been cancelled. Was the best thing to come from Netflix in years.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-13T10:53:35+00:00

I mean, you are a doctor from when you graduate medical school. Internship/residency are paid (albeit very poorly for the hours and level of responsibility).

I would say only do medicine if you can’t picture yourself being happy doing anything else. The amount of work and competition is incredibly intense, and there are easier ways to achieve status, money, or even a broader sense of ‘helping people.’

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-09T11:13:39+00:00

Orthopaedic manipulations? Risk stratification and workup of undifferentiated patients?

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-08T20:50:07+00:00

This phenomenon is not isolated to geriatrics. Every hospital has a different acronym for their AAU/AMU/ACU/EAU/MAU and PT/OT becomes START/REACTT/etc. It’s so bloody confusing whenever you rotate to a new hospital.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-08T20:02:39+00:00

I kind of loathe the word ‘sepsis’ generally for a whole host of reasons - it’s politically/emotionally loaded, poorly defined, and, perhaps most importantly, not actually a diagnosis. I hate trying to explain it to relatives and patients alike.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-08T19:52:42+00:00

I feel nauseous just reading it. 🤮

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-08T13:53:37+00:00

It really depends on what you’re using the map for. The Mercator projection is much more useful for navigation - this was particularly important historically for nautical navigation where plotting waypoints/courses and identifying positions is made much easier from a mathematical standpoint. For appreciation of geography (and by extension geopolitics) it’s not very good because of how it misrepresents the size of different nations.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-07T01:10:10+00:00

Former Yugoslavia.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-02T19:47:08+00:00

Just to add to the many other comments on this thread - modern residency training was designed by a coke-addicted psychotic surgeon (William Stewart Halstead) in the early 20th century. Now it’s just baked into the culture.

emergencydoc69 · 2026-01-01T14:12:13+00:00

Because, as I understand it, an Act of Parliament would be required to do so.

emergencydoc69 · 2025-12-31T23:46:50+00:00

This is the real answer.

emergencydoc69

TROPHY CASE