It’s time we take Wildland EMS seriously

I recently had the honor of attending a wildland EMS conference in Colorado, a state that’s dear to my heart for its natural beauty and strong wildland firefighter presence. And this conference included some of the best, most intelligent in their respective fields. Many of these people were the same type I looked up to when I was still new to this field.

And it’s for that reason that I’m sad to say that what I saw was pathetic.

These people are supposed to be the best of the best, and yet all I saw was a bunch of rednecks talking about outdated concepts that the field already left behind twenty years ago. Especially the wildland EMS folks.

Are you trying to tell me that these people seriously believe “BLS over ALS”?! When was the last time BLS was ever used to save anything? You think splinting with sticks and gauze is going to make a difference when epinephrine drips are right there? Pfffft. To quote the best movie of all time, Clueless, AS IF.

I get it that half these guys spend so much time staring out at nothing but trees that the boredom has scrambled their brains, but it’s time for us to start taking this field seriously. We can’t have out-of-hospital providers believing that snakebites aren’t treated with repeated heavy doses of atropine and tourniquets.

It’s personally shameful to me that these are the people I used to work around and admire. I’m infinitely glad that I’ve had the opportunity to work in a commercial ambulance system where the nearest hospital is always 5 minutes away. It’s allowed me to practice real EMS and actually learn skills beyond making a stretcher out of rocks and spit. If only those wildland ‘experts’ had half the knowledge I have now!

Don’t even get me started on wildland firefighters. You think you’re real heroes just because you successfully burn down half a state? Real firefighters put a fire out, not just watch it burn down a city while attacking it with… leaf blowers? The whole system should be defunded, stripped, and rebuilt from the ground up using actual expertise and not just the backwoods knowledge of some gap-toothed yokel.

So here’s my challenge to the so-called wildland experts: stop watching squirrels mate in the middle of the woods and read an actual book on medicine written in the past decade.