Recent content by DeadCactus

No route without additional training. Tangentially, that username could have used some peer-review...

This basic question is frequent on this forum. While the military is often actively recruiting medical personnel, it's not some last resort bastion for people failing in their civilian life. I'm all for second chances for people who fall off the traditional path, but the idea that one of the...

Guard and Reserve are so unit dependent, I would try to talk to the units you would potentially be assigned to. You may have a great Guard opportunity near you and trash Reserve options or vice versa.

This post really needs to be reiterated. I think this is something a lot of trainees and even emergency medicine attendings don't always understand; business hour jobs get vacation days, sick days, CME days, administrative days, etc. that drastically reduce the actual number of days worked in a...

It sounds like you don't really love emergency medicine, you love the idea of what you wish it was. It sounds like your options are retire, continue and be unhappy, move somewhere that practices emergency medicine the way you want, or switch to another career.

Treating family, friends, and acquaintances in a CMG ED sounds like a circle of hell. A year of fellowship to go into private practice at an established clinic with your family sounds great (assuming you have a good relationship with that family and can work together); you can always do PRN...

Your acting like extreme edge cases in a specific sign-out circumstance are the routine outcome and using inflammatory language to back up a practice that is all about local culture and has nothing to do with professionalism. No one is talking about routinely showing up 30 minutes late but...

I get the frustration with the chronically late but I don't see how expecting people to waste 2 hours a month at work drinking coffee to avoid ever being late is more respectful of their time than occasionally being late and extending people some grace when they are also late. The majority of...

The review threads used to be a really useful part of this forum before it became emergency medicine's version of a VFW.

It's funny, to me, 12-16 in an 8 hour shift sounds fine but 12-16 in a 24 hour shift sounds terrible. I get the appeal and find myself thinking about it sometimes but I'm just not cut-out for it. I want the opposite. I want patient based and not hour based shifts. Give me a start time in a busy...

Neat, hadn't heard of this. Coast Guard USUHS would be a pretty tempting deal for people planning on primary care type specialties.

Some people lie down in front of a bus and some people decide to wander onto the Daytona 500 track...

I get the general point you’re making but I’m pretty content ordering a troponin and d-dimer everyday. It’s not like I have strong literature saying the previous 99 days of chest pain evaluation mean they aren’t having ACS when they show up on day 100 with chest pain. New ED visit (especially...

Some emergency medicine staff get too emotionally wrapped up in laying down the law and not falling for "tricks". Then they get caught up in their biases (or worse, the biases of the other ED staff) and make poor decisions like this. There are some hard-stops in emergency medicine where you...

It sounds like military medicine was great when it still did retirement and dependent care. My understanding is we pulled those out and doomed military medicine because it was politically favorable to spend that money under the VA's name instead of as part of the "military budget". But I agree...