Would you ever try that?

[v85 212]

On another EMS website that I read, they were talking about a case where online medical control gave a medic an order to give 5mg Morphine ever 5 minutes until the patient stopped breathing

The patient was apparently having 10/10 pain upon breathing, resulting in difficulty in breathing; and the doctor thought it would be best to have the medic take over breathing and then use narcan at the hospital to bring him back.

Would anyone on here be comfortable doing that, even with OLMC?

[FDNY 10-75 640]

I take it they don't have RSI? And no benzos? Seems very strange.

[FireMedic049 597]

On another EMS website that I read, they were talking about a case where online medical control gave a medic an order to give 5mg Morphine ever 5 minutes until the patient stopped breathing

The patient was apparently having 10/10 pain upon breathing, resulting in difficulty in breathing; and the doctor thought it would be best to have the medic take over breathing and then use narcan at the hospital to bring him back.

Would anyone on here be comfortable doing that, even with OLMC?

I'm no doctor, but this sounds very, very suspicious to me for multiple reasons:

1) I find the notion that a physician would direct a paramedic to medicate a patient to the point were they stop breathing highly suspect;

2) If the physician wanted the paramedic to take over breathing for the patient, then this could be accomplished by sedating the patient with Versed rather than having to stop their breathing altogether using Morphine;

3) If the goal was to stop the patient's breathing in order to take it over manually, then why give the morphine in 5mg/5 minute intervals? Why not just give it faster?;

4) I can't quite fathom the conversation between a paramedic and a physician regarding a patient with the symptoms described above and how it would end up with the physician deciding that the best course of treatment for painful breathing would be to stop the patient from breathing.

I would be curious to know more details.

As for your question.......would I do it? Hell NO!

[v85 212]

I don't know the full story behind it, or how long ago it was. Maybe this was pre-RSI days? That's what I am kind of thinking

[EMT111 149]

Not for nothing, but this is a story from another site, and the person on the other site probably heard it from someone else, meaning were at least 3 people removed from the original story. I would think that there's a chance that the physician ordered the the 5 mg of morphine every 5 minutes until the pain went away or he stopped breathing (meaning the patient probably had the limit on the morphine and any more would overdose him.) Then again, there are just some stupid medics out there, I had one a couple of months ago give nitro to a patient with a systolic pressure of 100 (technically within the ALS protocols), then be genuinely surprised when the patient started going in and out of consciousness, and then decide that we should bypass the local hospital to go to the patient's choice facility (another 30 minutes away) even though the patient was basically unconscious.