Thanks Rogue Medic – What are EMS’s “Fad Diagnoses”?

Our friend Rogue Medic has a shiny new site up there on the Interwebs. It rocks. Rogue Medic is one of the many, many bloggers, non-bloggers, and/or random people who are much, much smarter than I am. I read his site a lot and I am very pleased to throw a link to his new site. He’s part of a new blog network with the URL Http://www.EMSblogs.com. Rogue has been joined by our other friends David Konig and Too Old To Work, Too Young to Retire.

That URL again for Rogue Medic is: Http://www.RogueMedic.com

Too Old to Work’s new digs are at: Http://www.ToOldToWork.com (yes, I know the “To” should be a “Too” and it just bugs the hell out of me as well)

And you can find everyone on their network on Http://www.EMSblogs.com 

Anyways, since this is my blog and you’ll come back here eventually. Rogue Medic pointed me to a site that I’m quite surprised I hadn’t found before Http://www.QuackWatch.com It’s provided me with some hours of entertainment tonight and since I’m a nerd and I admit it, that’s ok for me.

On QuackWatch, I read an interesting article on “Fad Diagnoses” with a handy checklist at the end that tells one how to create a bona-fide fad disease. (The article is here, with a lot of handy links: http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/fadindex.html)

 The checklist, which is just entertaining as hell, is below:

 Recipe for a New Fad Disease

• Pick any symptoms—the more common the better.
• Pick any disease—real or invented. (Real diseases have more potential for confusion because their existence can’t be denied.)
• Assign lots of symptoms to the disease.
• Say that millions of undiagnosed people suffer from it.
• Pick a few treatments. Including supplements will enable health food stores and chiropractors to get in on the action.
• Promote your theories through books and talk shows.
• Don’t compete with other fad diseases. Say that yours predisposes people to the rest or vice versa.
• Claim that the medical establishment, the drug companies, and the chemical industry are against you.
• State that the medical profession is afraid of your competition or trying to protect its turf.
• If challenged to prove your claims, say that you lack the money for research, that you are too busy getting sick people well, and that your clinical results speak for themselves.

This checklist got me to thinking about what “fad diseases” we may be treating as Paramedics and EMTs in the prehospital setting. While logically, I can think that we must be treating diagnoses that are more en-vogue than others, I can’t really seem to think of one off hand. I blame it on a mixture of my long day and my ADD. I would guess that our contemporary collective attention to STEMI care could be one. While ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction’s are quite serious and require immediate intervention, haven’t you noticed that we never call anything a “heart attack” anymore and now everything’s a STEMI? Do we emphasize the diagnosis of the STEMI at the expense of other conditions, such as Thoracic Aneurism or a Pulmonary Embolism? What about non-STEMIs?

Since I’m drawing a blank on something where I believe that logically, I should be able to think of something, I’m asking for your opinions:

What are the “Fad Diagnoses” of contemporary EMS? Feel free to add your own in the comments section below. I’m sure this could get wildly entertaining.

(Oh, and I’m not making any clams as to the existence or non-existence of any of the “Fad Diagnoses” posted here or on the other site. If you think they’re real, then heck… why not?)