Paramedic to Nurse or Doctor? What to Expect in Nursing and Medical School

In this episode of The Erik and Matt Show, we tackle one of the most common questions we get: Should paramedics go to nursing school or med school? Erik and Matt share their personal journeys through nursing and medical school, comparing them to their time in paramedic school. What’s different? What’s harder? What should you expect? Whether you’re looking to advance your EMS career or are simply curious about these career paths, this episode is packed with insights, advice, and a healthy dose of humor.

Transcript

Matt: [00:00:00] In the tests, I was really struggling getting good grades because I was thinking like a paramedic.

Erik: Yeah. My wall looked like a serial killer.

Narrator: You are listening to EMS. With your hosts, Erik Axene and Matt Ball.

Matt: Well, that's it's a question that I get asked quite frequently as a longtime [00:00:30] firefighter paramedic. And then I went to nursing school in 2017. Um, so I was actually teaching at a local community college. It was a side job before we started, um, side job where I was teaching EMTs.

and paramedics. I was in the skills lab. And, um, several of the instructors that I worked with had gone through a, they had a [00:01:00] bridge program at this specific school, paramedic, either paramedic or LVN to RN. And like I say, several of the guys that I worked with had done this program, never thought about being a nurse, getting my nursing degree, never thought about that.

And so, After working with these guys for a while, I thought, man, that's a really good idea. We, at that time, we actually had a couple of guys from my department that had to medically retire early, um, for various health reasons. [00:01:30] And I thought, man, you know, what would I do? Obviously, being a fireman is a pretty physical job.

Erik: Right.

Matt: And, you know, what would I do if You know, for some reason I couldn't continue on in my firefighting career. I'm not a, I'm not a construction guy. One of the guys had a big construction company. He was very, you know, he's very successful. But I was like, I, that's not me. That's not, you know, what I do.

So anyway, that was kind of the reason why I looked. into going to nursing school, but I get asked all the time by paramedics when I'm teaching. [00:02:00] Um, you know, they ask if they should go to nursing school or what it's like to go to nursing school. And so, um, you know, I did my prereqs, all that kind of stuff.

What kind of prereqs did

Erik: you have to do?

Matt: Just general college prereqs, A and P, one and two. Oh, you had to do physiology? Yeah, I had to do A and P classes. Um. And then just general study classes for the college degree, you know, uh, you know, humanities and things like psychology, things like that. It wasn't a lot of medically based [00:02:30] classes besides the A& P courses.

Microbiology, I guess, was another class I had to take. That was a prerequisite. Um, so then my nursing program, once I got done with those prereqs, it, again, it was a bridge program. It took one semester, so nursing school is typically four semesters or two years. So it takes one semester off of those, those four.

So you have three semesters and then they run concurrently. They did spring, summer, fall. So it wasn't spring, fall, [00:03:00] spring, or whatever. Now the program is actually, they don't have it anymore. So I was kind of lucky to get in on it. So it was a one year nursing school. So I started in August of 2017 and then finished in August of 2018.

Um, so it was very different. Um, I realized really quickly, um, going through, You know, the information's all the same, right? The body systems, disease processes. I'm

Erik: curious. How's it different? I'm curious.

Matt: So it was different in that when I was [00:03:30] testing, in the tests, I was really struggling getting good grades because I was thinking like a paramedic.

Because I had been a paramedic at that point, like 15 years or something. And finally somebody said to me, they're like, Matt, you can't think like a paramedic. And they said, for nursing, you have to think like the mother of a sick child. That kind of has to be your mindset when you go in and take, take these tests.

Erik: Can you give me an example?

Matt: Yeah, so it's like, what is everything, like an ER [00:04:00] physician I would think would be the same thing like a paramedic. Everything is based off of saving a life.

Erik: Yeah.

Matt: Right, like. acute problems,

Erik: emergencies,

Matt: right? Exactly. You can't think like that as a nurse, right? Because again, it's not just ER nursing, it's med surg, it's OB, it's all these different types of nursing.

And so a lot of it is long term definitive care. It's not all just acute life threatening emergencies. And so I was, as I was taking these tests, I was always looking for what's the acute [00:04:30] problem. What do I need to address first? You know, and you know, with like national registry and stuff. Put them on oxygen or all those kind of things.

And in nursing, it would be offered them ice chips or a warm blanket. Like. That would be the answer to some of these questions where oxygen might be a choice. And so it was just a very different mindset and I realized very quickly that the scope of practice for a paramedic as opposed to a nurse is very different.

I would say with the exception of [00:05:00] probably an ER nurse or like a flight nurse, something like that. Obviously a flight nurse is doing the same thing that a paramedic is doing, but that's not the majority of nursing. The other thing that I found, uh, which might make some nursing instructors mad or nursing schools mad is I found the, the curriculum very Very, I thought it was very outdated in the realm of You could tell it was very much based on female students going through [00:05:30] nursing school Very few instructors were male which that didn't really play into it much But the thing that really surprised me was the emphasis on OB, neonatal, neonatal and postpartum care, like an entire semester dedicated to that.

And like very little acute care, critical care stuff, you know, so, and an entire semester I'm spending in a nursery [00:06:00] dealing with

Erik: babies. Is that the same across the board with different training programs from what you know? As

Matt: far as I know, yes. This is the curriculum because the NCLEX, which is the National Registry Exam for Nurses, basically your boards, I've heard that nurses

Erik: have talked about.

Yeah,

Matt: the NCLEX exam is just the National Registry Exam for Nurses. It's the test that you take to get your nursing license.

Erik: And I'm guessing though that what they recommend you to study reflects what you're describing. Correct.

Matt: Yes. The curriculum is to [00:06:30] help you pass the NCLEX, right? That's there, which I understand that, but I just felt like it was very outdated.

And, and, um, like when I was in, I remember specifically, I was at a local hospital doing a clinical and I was in postpartum. Well, here I am a guy going into these rooms with women that just had babies. And typically their spouses were in the room. And I'm sure, you know, as a physician, some of these exams are pretty personal.

I mean, you're doing. Vaginal exams, rectal exams, you know, look for tearing, [00:07:00] things of that nature. Well, no female, and I don't blame them one bit. No female really wants some guy nursing student coming in, looking at those things, certainly husbands. are super uncomfortable with some dude coming in here, you know, doing that.

It's just, I dunno, I felt like it was, uh, it was very awkward for me. I had a, I had an instructor, I got a pen hanging off of me. I had an instructor, I just reached in, I got a random pen. Um, [00:07:30] But I had an instructor, I had a clinical coordinator, who my clinical coordinator, I will say, for my OB and postpartum rotations, she was phenomenal.

She was absolutely phenomenal. Her husband was a firefighter, she got it. But I had one of my nursing preceptors, who was a shift nurse that I was paired with for the day. And she was going into the room and she was, she would kind of go in ahead of me and she would say, Hey, you know, hi, my name is so and so, I'll be your nurse today, and I have a student [00:08:00] today.

But he's a male. And so every time she would say that, the patients would be like, I don't want him in here. And so I was literally for half the day, I was sitting outside the room. I'm just sitting in the hallway while she's in there doing her things. And finally my clinical coordinator walks by and she's like, what are you doing?

And I'm like, we've gone into like five rooms and nobody wants a guy in there. And she's like, well, how do they know you're a guy? I'm like, I don't know. And so she goes up to the nursing. The nurse that I was paired with and kind of got into her a little bit and she's like how do they know any practice?

[00:08:30] Yeah, she's like how do they know he's a male? Well, i'm telling him she's like You have no business telling his Gender has, doesn't play a role. He's here to learn, but anyway, the, the point was, I just thought it was very like, I mean, my intention was I was either going to work ER, ICU, and I didn't really feel like knowing all these things about postpartum care was applicable to what I was going to do.

Right. Anyway, I, so I thought that a lot of that kind of stuff was very outdated. Like I said, I [00:09:00] spent one day in an ICU, just kind of standing around. Um, I spent one 12 hour shift in an ER, but I had multiple shifts postpartum. I had multiple shifts in the nursery, multiple shifts on the OB floor.

Erik: Um, good at all that postpartum care.

Matt: Oh man, no, I don't, I wouldn't say that. I wouldn't say that at all. Um, But so the scope of practice is very different, you know, as paramedics, and you know this obviously, but for people for nurses, maybe that don't understand, you know, as paramedics, we work under a medical director's [00:09:30] license, we work under protocols,

Erik: right?

Matt: And we are the ones that are kind of making the decision. You know, it's funny. They always say, well, you don't diagnose in the field. Well, if I don't don't diagnose, how do I treat? You know, that's kind of silly. You got to find the diagnosis. You have to assess it. I got to diagnose SVT to treat SVT, right?

You know, and so that's how we work as paramedics. As nurses, it's very different. You know, you kind of go in there and you're doing an assessment and, but you're basically following the doctor's orders for that specific patient.

Erik: Right.

Matt: [00:10:00] Based on whatever floor you're working on or whatever. So it's just an entirely different scope of practice.

But one of the things that I would say about nursing, as opposed to being a paramedic, is there is a lot more options being an RN. Then being a paramedic and, and I hate to say this, I hope that this changes, but I would say if you are interested in the medical field and you're looking at either becoming a paramedic or a nurse and [00:10:30] you really don't have much of an interest being a firefighter, my personal opinion, and this is just my opinion, I would say you're better off getting your nursing license because as a nurse, Okay.

You can still do pre-hospital medicine. You can become a ground critical care nurse, a flight nurse. You, you, there's options for pre-hospital stuff if you want to go that route. But you can be in the er, you can be in the ICU. If you're in, you know, ob, med surg, you can go into the [00:11:00] business side of nursing.

There is a lot more options when it comes to nursing. As far as being a paramedic, you really have two options. Either you work private ambulance. Three options, private ambulance, fire department, or flight, you know, critical care. Uh, private ambulance, you're not making much money. It would blow people away.

The average person, and you know this, what these paramedics are asked to do, [00:11:30] you know, and they're making less than people flipping burgers at a burger place, you know, sometimes it's, it's not uncommon for them to be making less money than a barista at Starbucks, you know, and they're making life or death decisions and have a high level of training.

Critical care paramedics. Those are some of the smartest people I've ever met. I mean, they rival physicians that I've talked to with their level of knowledge. I mean, these people are smart. They know their stuff. And they're making less than most entry level [00:12:00] firefighters. You know, because they're working for a municipality.

So really, if you're a paramedic, and you want to get compensated well and make a career out of that, the best thing to do is work for a fire department, because you're going to get paid more. Um, so there's just a lot more. And again, if you're a nurse, if you're working in ER, any nursing field, you're going to make a lot more money.

That's just the reality of it.

Erik: Nurse practitioners as well. Yes.

Matt: You can continue your education. CRNA, one of the guys I went to school with, he was a firefighter, a local department. When he [00:12:30] started nursing school, he'd only been there a few years. And his goal was when he got out, he was going to quit the fire department and he wanted to become a CRNA.

And he did that. He, as soon as we got done with nursing school. He, uh, got a job in an ICU, quit his fire department job, um, did his ICU time, applied to CRNA school, and he just recently finished within the last year or so, and now is a practicing CRNA. Probably making great money, you know, doing a great job.

Super smart guy. But, yeah, there's just a lot more options, but, [00:13:00] you know, I think if you're looking, if you're already a firefighter paramedic, which these are the people that a lot of times are asking me these questions, just know that being a nurse is a very different profession. It's a different scope of practice, I guess is the only way to really say it.

You really have to think differently unless you're working in an ER, which most firefighters that I know that have gone on to get their RN, they are working in the ER. Um, I did, I've never worked in an ER as a nurse. Um, I've had the ability to do that, the, [00:13:30] the opportunities to do that, and I just never did it because I was so busy on the ambulance that going in, you know, working a 24 48 hour shift getting my butt kicked on the ambulance to just go into a hospital and get my butt kicked for 12 more hours didn't seem appealing to me.

Um, I did pre op and PACU stuff, which was interesting, a different side of nursing. Um, But yeah, it's just very, very different. Um, it's a very different field. And I know, to you, a lot of people have asked about, like, med school. And [00:14:00] like, what is it like taking the MCATs? What's it like going to med school?

So, share that experience with us.

Erik: Well, um, I have a question for you first. Okay, go. So it seems to me, the nurses that I've had in the ER, that's most of my experience with the nurses, um, is, uh, is a real hunger to, to be able to think critically and to, and to do things on their own. Um, it seems like there's less, there's less freedom to do [00:14:30] that as a nurse, as opposed to being a paramedic.

Yes. I mean, you kind of, you're in, you're on your own really in an ambulance, whereas in the ER. I'm right there. There, you know, there's a lot of orders to follow assessments to do and things to document. There's also, they're working very hard. Yes.

Matt: And they're very smart. Oh, your nurses are sharp.

Erik: Yeah. And that was my point, I guess, is that I'm, my experience as an ER doc, when I've given, uh, some, some flexibility to, [00:15:00] to, uh, to a nurse, to, you know, give this push dose presser when the pressure is here or, you know, those parameters all of that.

Yeah, those are to think critically and to, to, uh, you know, uh, make decisions on their own with something that they really wanted. I wondered if it was because they don't get to do that very often.

Matt: They don't get to do that very often. I, as a matter of fact, when I was. Working as a nurse at a facility. Um, we had a patient that came in, I was doing initial vitals on them, and the [00:15:30] patient's O2 sats were pretty low.

And so, the paramedic in me kicked in, got out a nasal cannula, put him on a nasal cannula. I actually got reprimanded by the physician because he had not put in an order for oxygen. And I was like, I just was like, are you kidding me? You know, so. So, but another thing I would say is this is some other advice that I do give to anybody looking at nursing, whether you're a paramedic or you're just a, like my daughter's in nursing school and I've given her [00:16:00] this advice.

If you're thinking about nursing, I would say this, regardless of what discipline you want to do, if you want to be, I mean, I guess I should say if you know you want to be an OB nurse and that's all you want to do, fine, go for it. But if you don't really know what field of nursing you want to do, I would strongly recommend it.

That the first two years of your nursing career either do, uh, ER or ICU. And the reason I say that is because working in, those are the only [00:16:30] two fields in the hospital that do critical care. And if you have two years experience as an ER nurse or an ICU nurse, you can get a job anywhere. Any. ambulatory surgery center, surgery center, uh, OB med surge floor.

Any hospital will hire you if you have that critical care experience, because they know as an ER ICU nurse, you're going to see a, especially as an ER nurse, you're going to see everything from your, [00:17:00] you know, just your normal sick people to pediatric patients, to OB patients. to trauma patients, to cardiac, you're going to see all of it and you're going to get great experience on how to manage really sick patients as opposed to being on a med search for nothing, not knocking the med surge nurses, but they don't get exposure to the really sick, sick patients, you know?

Um, so that's my advice to anybody that's looking at or going through nursing school and they don't know what they want to do. I would say go into the ER, go into the [00:17:30] ICU, get that critical care level experience. And then going anywhere else will be a cakewalk.

Erik: That makes

Matt: sense. So easy to do. So, anyway.

Erik: So, yeah.

Med school. Yeah. Um, man, med school, that's a

Matt: Big

Erik: topic. Well, yeah. You got a free decade of your life.

Matt: Now, that includes So, is that just med school or that's

Erik: undergrad? Well, you, I mean, if you're going to go to med school, yeah, you'll go through med school and then you have residency [00:18:00] afterwards and then, and in many do a fellowship as well.

Right. And you can do sub fellowships. I mean, there's a lot. What's the

Matt: difference between a fellowship and, and, uh, Well,

Erik: for me, for example, I was planning to do a pediatric fellowship after I finished my ER residency. So, um, I can be a board certified ER doctor after I complete, uh, an accredited emergency medicine residency after my four years of medical school.

So [00:18:30] four years of medical school, and then three or four years, depending on the program for residency. So seven to eight years of school. Afterwards, man, I really want to be a pediatric ER doctor, so, got it. A pediatric fellowship was my plan. You could do all sorts of other fellowships.

Matt: Now, is medical school the same for every doctor, whether you're ER or an orthopedic surgeon or a neurosurgeon?

Mostly it's all pretty much the same.

Erik: Pretty much the same. Okay. Um, there are, so when you start off. [00:19:00] When you, well, when you make the decision, you want to go to medical school, it's usually a couple of years before school starts because it's a long application process and tests, the MCAT, and then, and then, um, interviews and all sorts of stuff that happens over the, you know, so if in 2020, if I decided today, beginning of 2025, I wanted to go to medical school, um, I might get in that fall of 2026.

Okay. So more than a year [00:19:30] later, that's, I would be applying. This is

Matt: after your

Erik: undergrad, you've already got your, yeah, that's right. You get your, you go through undergrad and you decide I want to be a doctor and you got to make sure you have the prerequisites and then you apply to medical school, uh, at an accredited school.

And, uh, there's all sorts of. paperwork to do personal statements. Uh, the MCAT, you got to take the medical college acceptance test. It might be aptitude.

Matt: What is that? What's on that test? I mean, I've seen the book and stuff, but

Erik: yeah, there's a [00:20:00] physical sciences, biological sciences, verbal reasoning. There's a, there used to be a written part.

I think that's gone now from when I took the MCAT, but basically it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a long. Um, that's meant to, um, kind of, I, I, in some ways I feel like it's meant to weed people out.

Matt: How long, what do you mean long? How long is it?

Erik: All day. Oh, all day? I remember correctly, I don't know, six weeks. six, seven hours of tests.[00:20:30]

Matt: So there's separate tests. It's not like one. Yeah. Yeah. That's when I took it.

Erik: Now it's all computerized. Now, back when I took it, it was with a pencil. Yeah. Scantron. And we got a, uh, there are multiple categories of scores that you get. And I think it's still the same way today. This is the categories just a little bit different flavor, but you end up with a score of some kind and then, uh, medical schools are able to take those scores and use them.

Thanks. I've been on an admission committee. Before we, you, you get thousands of [00:21:00] applicants, but you only want to interview a couple hundred. Sure. Cause you got to weed some people out. Right?

Matt: You did that based on their MCAT scores?

Erik: Part of it was. Yeah. It's like, there's a certain threshold for, we are not going to consider an application with a score below this.

Okay. And, uh, we aren't going to consider an applicant that doesn't have this experience. Maybe, who knows what it might be or GPA, your grades, you know, there's certain things you can do to rule people out. Um, and then you end up with an applicant. applicant pool, and then they send [00:21:30] out a secondary application.

And then from there, you may get an interview. And then from there you get acceptances.

Matt: So you're applying to medical schools all across the country.

Erik: Yeah. My wall looked like I was a serial killer. I had a bigger map of the United States.

Matt: I

Erik: put push pins on all the cities where I was going for interviews.

Matt: How many medical schools did you apply to? I think I

Erik: applied to like [00:22:00] 30 schools or something like that. And then I think I had interviews at a bunch of them and then we ended up picking the interviews we wanted based on the serial killer wall. My wife Debra and I, we decided. on, uh, the schools we were interested in.

And then we would, uh, we interviewed at those schools. And, uh, I went to medical school, married most people don't get, you were a little bit older. Most people are smarter than me. I remember

Matt: I didn't become a fireman [00:22:30] till I was 30. Yeah.

Erik: So anyway, so I went to, um, medical school later in life after another career.

And, and so, um, when I, I went married and so my wife and I, we did, we walked through it all together, trying to decide where we wanted to be. That'll test the marriage. Yeah. Fortunately, she's a great team member and we work well together. So it went really well, but, but it was challenging and it's a big life change and it was a big stress on her.

And she, she was a single mom for a lot of the times in [00:23:00] school, you know, and she's a professional herself. She's a dentist. So, um, anyway, uh, so, um, we went to medical school, we decided which schools we wanted to go to and, and we got acceptances. They kind of, they don't come in all at once. They kind of trickle in, you know.

We, we actually bought a house in the East Coast where we thought we were going to school and then, uh, we ended up not going there. So we had to sell the house, not sell the house, but we backed out and in that state it was, uh, really benefited the buyer. So in some [00:23:30] states it would penalize you, but we had no penalties.

We just, we just didn't sign it and walked away. And then we ended up going to medical school in Southern California and then, uh, neither of us are from there, but that's where we went to medical school. And then, so medical school. Medical school is four years long. The first year you kind of learn about how the body works.

The second year you learn how the body doesn't work well. You know, the diseases that threaten the physiology you learn the first year. And then the second, or the [00:24:00] last two years of medical school are your clinical years where you're, you're out there rotating and following doctors and residents around.

Before your residency, you're still doing

Matt: clinicals. Okay.

Erik: Yeah, but you're still taking tests. And you're still in labs and you're doing a lot of work, book work still, just not as much as the first two years. I've heard medical school described as drinking out of a fire hose and that's really true.

Matt: Paramedic and nursing school is the same

Erik: way.

Matt: Yeah.

Erik: So much information.

Matt: Because we're learning a ton of information, but in a much shorter [00:24:30] timeframe, you know, you're in there for four years, obviously you're learning more information, but

Erik: yeah, it's just, it is a challenge. And I got some advice early on that, you know, you don't have to be a paramedic.

Get the top of your class. C's get degrees, baby, right?

Matt: You know what they call it? Doctor, what is it? Uh, what do they call a guy that graduated from medical school at, you know, whatever college, as opposed to Harvard, they call them both doctors.

Erik: I, my first, uh, [00:25:00] confessions of an ER doctor. Okay. Here we go. I started medical school before I started.

I memorized the, the netter Atlas, which is like the anatomy Atlas. I, I, you memorized it. I did. I had a system. Um, and over the course of the year before medical school, uh, I had that thing memorized. I knew all of the foramina, I knew all of the nerves and I, I mean, I, and I'm a very visual person, not a photographic memory, but some hybrid of a photographic memory.

So I could still see the pages in my head, [00:25:30] you know, and, and so when everybody's, when I started medical school, when everybody's struggling to get through anatomy and physiology, I breezed through it and I was able to. So, uh, I spent a lot of time on the other class, and I spent a lot of time, and during that first year, I just wanted to be at the top of my class, and I was killing myself to do it, and it was not good for my family, like I said, I was married, so my wife and I had to learn pretty quick, that's not going to work.

Matt: What's like the hours in med school, [00:26:00] like, like, uh, course hours, like what do you take in a semester?

Erik: The problem is, I mean, there's a lot of courses you take. I, I, I don't know how many hours, but you're busy all the time and then you can give everything and it'll take it all. What do you mean? There's no limit of time it will take from you if you're willing to give it.

I mean, it'll take it all from you, take your life and see. Suck it dry. You know, if you, if you do that, but what I learned was, is that there's a, there's a, there's a [00:26:30] certain amount of time you could spend on something and do well in a certain subject area. Yeah. And then you may not get three or four questions, right?

If you choose to, you can study an additional five hours to get those three or four questions. But to me, I decided, you know what, no, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm going to be okay with getting three or four questions wrong and then still do well. Yeah. And then there's also a big push in medical school to, to perform well on your board.

Sure. Because residencies will look at the board scores to rank people. Now you're [00:27:00] choosing not to get into medical school, now you're choosing your specialty. Right. The rest of your life, what are you going to do? You kind of want to do something you like, right? Yeah. So there's a lot of push to do well on the boards, especially if you want to do a subspecialty.

Now emergency medicine used to be competitive back when I was doing it. Um, it was not as competitive as some, but competitive, more competitive than most. Sure. But right now it's. I know you said orthopedic

Matt: is kind of the big one. Orthopedics,

Erik: they're the road to success, they would call it. This was a while ago, it may [00:27:30] have changed, but radiology, orthopedics, anesthesiology, dermatology, and surgery.

I would have picked dermatology. The roads to success. I would have picked dermatology. I

Matt: would think

Erik: that Yeah, not a lot of skin emergencies out there. That's what I'm

Matt: saying. Do you get peed well? Burning

Erik: moles all

Matt: day. Burning

Erik: moles all day. No, no, there's a lot of respect for my dermatology folks.

There's a lot more to it than that. But it is relatively, clinic hours. Sure. Not a lot of skin. skin emergencies. And that's one of the reasons why dermatology is sought after is it's good for the lifestyle.

Matt: Yeah. [00:28:00]

Erik: And it pays well too. Yeah. But there's a, there's a, there's umpteen different things you can do in medicine.

And during medical school, you try to figure that out, choose the residency you want. After residency, you can even sub specialize in other things.

Matt: And that's where the fellowships come in. Right. Yeah.

Erik: So it's pretty easy to spend a decade of your life just in training alone. Is it worth it? Um, it depends.

Oh, well for me as an ER doc, definitely worth it. And And it was definitely something that I, I had no idea how cool [00:28:30] emergency medicine was until now. If I would have known then what I know now about emergency medicine, it would have been even more exciting. Yeah. But if I would have known then what I know now today about how hard it would have been, I probably wouldn't.

Matt: Yeah. Because, uh, you know, and you've told me this before and it blows me away. It baffles me that a lot of doctors. Other doctors kind of look down on the ER doctors, and I think that's crazy. Yeah. Because it's like if you're a cardiologist, all you gotta worry about is cardiology, the heart. You don't need to know anything about neurology or all these other things.

Yeah. You just, [00:29:00] whereas an ER doctor, like a paramedic, you gotta know a little bit about everything. I like to say

Erik: I'm a mile wide and an inch deep.

Matt: There you

Erik: go. Yep. Yep. Just like a paramedic. I like it that way. Nobody else is like that in medicine.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. It's a very interesting field. Well. Whatever people choose to do.

It's a you'll always have a job as a nurse a paramedic or a doctor. So true Yep. See you in the next one. Be safe out there.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to EMS the Erik and Matt [00:29:30] show.