BLUF: Crisis Medicine and Dr. Mike Shertz have no disclosures.
An important factor in medical education is disclosures. This is, who pays the presenter, where do they get their income? For example, if a presenter is sponsored by a widget manufacturer, students need to know that because the payment/sponsorship is likely to influence the presenter’s opinion.
Crisis Medicine has no disclosures. Full Stop.
We do not accept payment from industry. When approached to test a new piece of equipment or device, we do so and offer our opinion freely, leading one manufacturer lately to refer to Dr. Shertz as “the Tourniquet Bully.” But neither Dr. Shertz, nor Crisis Medicine accepts any funding for these opinions.
An important thing in medical education are disclosures. You should know the financial biases of the person who’s giving you a block of instruction to get a sense where their opinion may be tainted.
I’m an emergency physician. I do EMS work as well. Despite being the medical director for several EMS organizations, including a fire department and a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team, of which I’m the medical director, nothing I’m going to tell you is a representation of those organizations.
Everything I’m going to tell you is my own opinion and hopefully convince you of why I have the opinion I have by showing you medical literature.
I’m also a member of the Committee for Tactical Emergency Casualty Care, and nothing I’m saying here is a representation of them either. Though, we will talk about both their guidelines, which I helped write and the TCCC guidelines.
From private industry. I don’t have any disclosures either. I give my opinion freely to multiple organizations that manufacture some of the devices we’re talking about, but I refuse to take money for it because that would be a disclosure. If Company A paid me for an opinion on their product, I might be a little more favorable toward company a’s product because it makes me money. Therefore, I don’t take money from any of them.
The final thought I’ll leave you with is the second you finish watching this course, medicine will have changed slightly because, for example, an article was published the day before. If you really want to be professional regarding your expertise in this material, you’ll need to stay abreast of the literature or periodically retrain.