However, according to the TV commercials, toe nail infections are fungal.

I try not to limit my criticism to any particular category of people, even the doctor not capable of running a code without a nanny probably does a lot of other things well. Just not true emergencies.

I also tend to believe that they can be taught. I occasionally run into one trying to prove to me that there are people too stupid to be taught, but I still think that people can be taught.

They tell me that I must not have understood what was going on.

They tell me that the doctor is a doctor (and that is true) and therefore knows knows things that I do not know (which is also true) and that the doctor must have known something about this patient that I did not (and that is not a valid syllogism) and the doctor must have done the right thing for the patient (and that is nothing but insane faith in someone because of the title Doctor).

An interesting association is that these defenders of fellow doctors, these old boys’ clubbers, tend to have unreasonable faith in on line medical command requirements.

We have similar defense of medics, just because the person misbehaving is a medic. This insanity is something we need to try to eliminate from EMS.

The doctor kills the patient, or makes a valiant attempt at malpractice, but since I am just a medic, I could not possibly have seen it coming. I could not possibly have been right, when the doctor was wrong.

I have experienced too many of these. I would be happy to never have that experience again, but I am not that foolishly optimistic.

To be fair. I have seen nurses kill people. I have seen EMTs kill people. I have seen paramedics kill people. There is a whole spectrum out there from brilliance to quack. From CNA to MD. Anyone can be the weakest link in that chain.

Back to this doctor though. I tried to turn him in. I wrote a long incident report and turned it into my bosses and had a lot of meetings about it. I fear however that since we were a private service and they were a contracted hospital that nothing came of it.

I hounded the guy for months. I truly believed that he killed someone and that he should be wearing an orange jumpsuit and taking it from his roommate. This made me bold when I saw him. He was completely terrified of me and would not even make eye contact. Over the next few months whenever I saw him I would shout out, “How you sleepin’ at night, doc?” I caught him walking between a couple of ambulances to use the ER door and he was surprised to find me about two feet away from him. “Plan on killing anyone today doc?” I was merciless. Each time this happened he would bolt away from me. Eventually he got another job somewhere and I never saw him again.

To be honest, it was a low point for me. Not the most professional thing I have ever done. But instead of just going into some ivory tower of denial like most quacks do, he knew what he did and he was absolutely terrified of me. Hopefully that changed his behavior and he never let his ego get in the way of patient care again. The courts never made him accountable. It wasn’t really my business doing that, but he got the point. I try to have a little more style and grace when I am chewing ass nowadays. I have also been very humble when it was my turn.