HIPAA is essentially the law that governs the confidentiality that exists between healthcare workers, their patients, and their medical records. That’s why so many medical bloggers (WayfaringMD and Cranquis are good examples) remain anonymous. Anything kind of information that would allow someone to ascertain the identity of a patient would result in a HIPAA violation and is serious business.

No I am not.

Although this isn’t to say that I don’t respect nurses.

My job isn’t very common in the region where I work. And because of this (and the fact that the HIPAA gods are always watching) I am choosing to remain anonymous in regards to my job title. 

a ninja!

I currently became obsessed with scrubs and went on a binge fest and watched all 9 seasons in about a month

Well i wouldn’t say over the years since I’m still fairly new to my job (8 months), but some interesting things I’ve seen are

• Dercum’s disease
• Transverse myelitis
• Myxedema coma
• PCP (HIV)

Those are the interesting conditions that I could think of off the top of my head!

Well I’m no expert on this question but I’ll answer this to the best of my ability:

   It really depends. It will look good to have gotten your EMT, but I think if it’s utilized by having a job/volunteer experience where you get to put those skills to use. It might make the gateway into getting some clinical experience much easier, and from what I’ve heard, you have the opportunity to learn clinical skills that can help you out in the long run whether you’re pursuing med school or any other health profession.

The down side is this: It takes time to get your EMT certification and you need to make sure you’re able to manage your time accordingly. You don’t want to overextend yourself during the fall/spring semesters so if you want to get your EMT, a lot of community colleges offer a summer EMT-B course. 

Wellllll considering that is a long ways away:

Ideally something that would be really cool would be to do a combined Emergency Medicine/Internal Medicine residency program although there aren’t a lot of them. I would really like the versatility of being double boarded plus I could then do a fellowship in Pulm/CC (which I think you could also do with just EM). Either way it’s a lot of training but gives me a lot of versatility in how I would practice medicine

Either that or surgical critical care/trauma surgery. I absolutely love the adrenaline rush of trauma (I think that’ll probably wear off though as I get older) and I really liked the surgical critical care rotations I’ve done.

yes yes and doubly yes!