>Well indeed, precisely, the H for hypoxia was only added a few years ago,
>in a rather contrived sort of way, I believe, to make the mnemonic work!
>Dealing with hypoxia is surely "a given" when it comes to cardiac arrest
>management, so adding it as one of the "causes to consider" when you're
>resuscitating your EMD patient, is a bit of an insult to the team, I would
>have thought!
--> I believe the guidelines are intended for use by a medical community,
the majority of whom would NOT suffer from a reminder to confirm they are
doing all they can for Airway/Oxygenation. I am thinking about the 2am on
1st Thursday in February in a medical ward with
1-nurse-1-healthcare-assistant-and-a-brand-new-doc resuscitations... In any
case it's the "team" that go through these themselves, so they won't be
insulting themselves.
>But I do hate mnemonics with a vengeance, especially those overcontrived
>ones where you end up struggling to remember why, for example, the letter A
>stands for scalp, or the letter D (or was it E?) stands for midline shift!
>They're all very amusing at the time, but do little to encourage a logical
>pathological or physiological approach to a problem, and, ironically,
>people struggle to remember them several weeks later (or several days in my
>case). They should all be banned from medical education...
--> I am WAY OVER 100% in agreement with you here. Often recall gets in the
way of insight. Furthermore, if I had a magic wand, I'd throw into the same
bin conditions named after people. This is not only because I am very bad
with names and could never remember which name referred to what. Having
travelled and worked internationally rather a lot, which I still do, I keep
coming across physicians who have never heard of certain "inventors" or who
have their own local "inventors" associated with these conditions. Now here
is when one can get insulted...
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