Tips from the Emergency Medicine Forum.

Here are some good tips from the StudentDoctor.net forum on the subject, "Things I Learn From My Patients (Emergency Medicine)"

• Taking a whole bottle of diet pills at one time will not make you lose weight any faster for that date you have tomorrow night.
  
  
• The next time a cockroach crawls in your ear while you are sleeping, be sure to stick your finger in your ear and plug it so it can't get out then run to the ED for us to take it out. Then, as I squirt viscous lidocaine into your ear canal, tell me how gross that feels!
  
  
• If you are given a prescription for narcotics wait until the rx is filled before you try to sell them. Patient yesterday with pain complaint gets rx for vicodin and trys to sell them over the phone(loudly) in the E.D. lobby. "They gave me 30 vicodin...how about $250? OK, meet me here in 20 minutes". Overheard by staff who took written rx from pt and ripped it up in his presence.
  
  
• Never leave your last refill of percocet in plain site after your docs office closes if one of these 3 friends is coming over for dinner: (1) some dude; (2) my friend; (3) that bitch
  
  
• Sitting on the porch minding your own business is the #1 cause of knife wounds. [This is so common they have an acronym for it: SOCMOB="standing on the corner minding my own business"]
  
  
• Don't sit out on your front porch reading the bible and minding your own business at 2 AM unless you are praying to be shot
  
  
• Latex paint, despite being thick and creamy, does not coat your stomach and provide the same relief as pepto bismol.
  
  
• If you have taken 7 home pregnancy tests that are all positive, and you come into the emergency department...chances are that test too will come back positive.
  
  
• When attempting a self-circumcision do not use dry ice to numb the area... and when the dry ice sticks to the... a.... area, do not attempt to remove the ice with boiling water.
  
  
• When your 15yo daughter gives precipitous delivery to a bleating, underweight infant 30 minutes after presenting to triage c "gas pains", you should run around the department loudly yelling, "I don't know what y'all did or who that baby is, but my lil' girl warn't pregnant when she come in here"
  
  
• 17 year old kids are not immortal, no matter how cool their car is. This will be useful should I ever be 17 again.
  
  
• If it is late at night and you are hungry, the old chinese food and hunk of cheese that have been floating in a pool of fish blood at the bottom of a cooler full of fish and bait in the sun all day are a bad choice. The amount of projectile vomiting will be impressive.
  
  
• If you are 17 and very drunk and are brought to the ER with a face that looks like hamburger and an upper lip that needs to be put back together, please just say you got into a fight. We would prefer not to know that someone bet you $20 that you couldn't punch yourself unconscious (and you won).

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