Posts Tagged sports medicine
Emergency Medicine: The Fast Track to Healing
If you are considering a career in emergency medicine, it is important to know exactly what will be expected of you. Your primary job will be to act quickly in stabilizing patients in an emergency room setting. Beyond this, you will need to be able to promptly and efficiently recognize a sick or debilitated patient without much information or a lot of tools at your disposal; you must also be able to evaluate the patient and come up with the tentative diagnosis. You will also be required to work with many patients from many different backgrounds, and thus, should have a very good amount of communication skills.
If you truly have your heart set on becoming an emergency medicine physician, you will have to commit to a good deal of education, and a potentially very long stint in residency. Generally speaking, you will be required to have four years of undergraduate work under your belt; plus four years of medical school training with a focus on emergency treatments such as cardiac life support, and trauma care. You can also take additional courses for subspecialties like toxicology, pediatric and even sports medicine. After you have finished all of the educational requirements, you will then have to go through a rigorous residency, or in some cases, internship that can last anywhere from 3 to 8 years. These years are important, as they will ready you for the real-world experience of emergency medicine.
Tags: cardiac life support, educational requirements, emergency medicine physician, emergency physicians, emergency treatments, even sports, sports medicine, trauma care, undergraduate work, world experienceRelated posts
Sports Medicine Scams
Many people are familiar with and use alternative medical therapies. Most of these therapies have little research to support their use, yet remain popular with the general public. At COAST Rehab Services, we consider it a priority and part of our mission to provide our patients and the public with accurate and up to date information, especially as it pertains to health and sports medicine. We understand that conventional medicine doesn’t appeal to everyone and that alternative therapies can be very beneficial. The more accurate the information made available, the better able people are to make decisions regarding their physical therapy.
A recent article in The Sporting News discussed the use of Hyperbaric Oxygen Chamber therapy. Some professional teams and training centers use these devices in the belief that healing time (of an injury) can be significantly shortened. Several professional hockey teams used hyperbaric oxygen therapy (pregame doses) a decade ago, with near disastrous results, because they believed it would enhance performance. Hyperbaric oxygen is a mode of therapy in which the patient breathes 100% oxygen at pressures greater than normal atmospheric (sea level) pressure. During treatment a patient sits in a closed chamber that is filled with pure oxygen at high pressure, usually for several hours. The healing power of pressurized oxygen has long been acknowledged for deep sea divers suffering from “the bends” and for other emergency infections and injuries treated in a hospital. But, the FDA has not approved the use of hyperbaric oxygen for the treatment of sports injuries, neurological conditions such as cerebral palsy, MS, migraine and strokes, or other illnesses such as cancer and AIDS – the targeted patient population of these sports medicine scam artists. In fact, there are no sound, valid scientific studies that support that use. Beyond the questionable therapeutic value, there are potentially deadly dangers in hyperbaric therapy (seizure, fire). Emergencies are difficult to deal with because it takes several minutes to decompress the chamber before anyone can open the hatch to help the patient. For this and other reasons, the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS) has a well-established recommendation that hyperbaric chambers should be hospital-based.
Tags: conventional medicine, health and sports, medical therapies, oxygen chamber, oxygen therapy, patient population, professional hockey teams, rehab services, sea level pressure, sports medicineRelated posts