Take your time, I completely understand. Before you read on I want you to know I appreciate your comments, your attention, and your willingness to engage in this conversation. That being said my words for you are harsh at points, but not angry.
I appreciate your frustration, but I won't apologize. This is a democratic community. Had my feelings not been overwhelmingly supported my comment would not be where it is. I'm not sure how familiar you are with reddit, or this subreddit in particular but my comments received some of the most overwhelming support that comments see here. Click around a few other posts in the subreddit, my comments received over four times the response your original question did and more than that over what the average is around here. Now, you may argue that I breached etiquette when I specifically asked for exclusive support of my comments, and that may be true. However, I consider my fellow EMS professionals a smart bunch and I don't think I managed a full brainwashing effect in those few sentences.
I realize I sound arrogant, but you do as well. You basically just replied to one of the most supported things ever written on this subreddit by saying "I don't have to talk to any of you, I'm a Doctor who once was an EMT. I'm talking to you because I enjoy it only." And then, instead of engaging me with any of these topics, simply say "prove everything with data". Is that a helpful response? If you read the replies from other Paramedics I think you'll see that it was written with, and received by those in EMS with a pleading tone, not an accusatory one. A desperate, we're at the end of our rope kind of tone.
Let's compare your assertion that these are my thoughts to the comments posted in response:
I applaud you. Please keep fighting the good fight and saying these things. I love EMS more than anything, and I don't meet many like you often. Those of us that don't have the longevity that you do get our voices stamped out with threats of being fired, being ignored, or find ourselves blacklisted, etc. Thanks for having a clear and well-thought out and articulate argument. I hope you find the right forum for it.
Superb post my friend... The scary thing is that pretty much all of this is true for London at least, and I assume the rest of the UK. It's odd that this profession is seeing the same problems across the pond.
You can argue small sample size I suppose, this subreddit only has around 13,000 members and my comment only had about 50 upvotes, but at that point aren't you just arguing that no matter what this community said it would be invalid in the same way?
I'm not going to point to the support of the community for my comments to justify what I've said again as it has no relevance to the actual facts of what we are talking about. Only that your assertion that these are solely my thoughts is false and a little insulting to the community who took their time to upvote, comment, and purchase reddit gold for my comments, which were also not written flippantly or off hand. If this community feels like it's being misrepresented it's perfectly capable of letting that be known.
I know all this sounds mellow dramatic, I know all this sounds like I am some burnt out salty medic who want's it to seem so hard and that I'm so special. I'm not, I not only love my job but I don't work in one of those horrible systems. I work in a wonderful system where I'm free to say these things. I say them because I've worked in the other systems and I know that no one speaks out for them. Again, I'm making vague claims here because that's all I can do with you. I don't know where you work, I can't tell you if I can speak to your system. I can't explain where our miss-communications are, but they are there. We are both trying to do the right thing, and coming off to the other one as confrontational.
I thought that you came here to hear from the community, so I spoke up as a leader of that community. Not on my own behalf, notice the use of "we" throughout when not talking about my personal experience. I have no interest in talking to you out of "enjoyment" and to that end my time is more important than your entertainment. I misunderstood your intent and thought you were interested in talking about some of the real hardships facing Paramedicine, to that extent I'm happy to write all day. It's what I do for a living. But at this point I don't know if you and I can even communicate effectively any more.
Here's the thing, this is my opinion as a career paramedic that has worked in a few systems. Could I be wrong? Sure. But I found it pretty interesting that a London Paramedic echoed my thoughts exactly, while they are actively going through the problems I'm trying to warn about. Is that not evidence? Or do you need me to link you specific studies and articles? Because that's a pretty high demand in quality of response to "what's new in EMS" for you to reject responses for.
I know that this post was confrontational as well at some points, but I want to be clear that your position as a doctor does not make you a leader of the Paramedic community and being abreast of developments is far from being an expert. If you don't see our input as valuable beyond entertainment I'm afraid we don't see your entertainment as valuable as our time. What you see as arrogance I see as experience. I can say these things with full confidence of the support of the community because I am an ingrained member of that community.
Do you know how long it took to understand the massively intricate and overlapping EMS system in way that I can talk about it so fluidly and fluently that Paramedics from across the world join in with support?! I guess I did fall back to the support of the community anyway, but if your attitude really is that you would only bother checking in for your enjoyment with the actual professionals who do this for a living because you're a doctor and clearly with just a little work could manage the understanding someone like I have, I'm alright with it.
The final truth of this for me is that what I wrote I didn't write to you. I wrote it to the /r/ems subreddit. I wrote it because I can, I have a talent for that. I understand the system at a level and can write that response to you, I know you don't know this, but that's rare. I wrote it because most of the people working in those systems need to hear it. Because there are probably only 100 out of the 13,00 people on this subreddit who understand the connection of legislation down to boots on the ground. So, I know that you may have been insulted, and I didn't mean to do that. I want you to know these things, I really do, but you may not be able to understand them. The first sentiment in your post is that with a part of your practice you can surely do what someone who dedicates their lives to this does, and at the end of the day that attitude is and what you wrote is the worst nightmare of everyone in EMS.
Here is how my education is the same as an RN: http://www.reddit.com/r/ems/comments/2u0tmg/whats_new_in_ems/co4gm8h
I'm happy to talk to you about any topic in EMS, if you have an actual interest professional interest. If you are just looking for something fun to talk about in a conference then I'm sorry for the overly serious response. EMS isn't going to stop tomorrow, I'm not preaching the doomsday, but I sure will be more pessimistic when it's 14 Paramedic suicides in 11 weeks.