Jubbergun wrote:
I'm just going to butt in here and explain that "combat medic" generally goes way beyond nurse. My sub would deploy for months at a time with only a combat medic on board for medical care. He was qualified to perform surgery, if necessary...on a submarine...which moves around while you're working and has the barest of medical amenities.
Dotzy might be speaking well past his level of expertise, but even his level of expertise in this area is so far beyond your own as to preclude you're knowing whether he is or not.
Spare us the "you can't understand how awesome military people are" tripe. It's tired and unconvincing, and having to rely on it suggests that there's nothing beneath that empty bravado. In any event, subs take on only the most talented personnel. Dotzilla didn't serve aboard a sub.
Fwiw, the reason they prefer non-doctors for medical duties aboard a sub, when other ships get doctors, is probably that they believe that less educated personnel are more controllable. A medic is less likely than a doctor to inquire into questions of safety or morality, or to second-guess the official line, because he's entirely reliant on the Navy materials for his medical knowledge. If a medic is told that something is safe then he will not have the knowledge, training or inclination to dispute that, and because he's not licensed to practice medicine except on his ship, he can't just get another job. Doctors have a wide selection of career paths and therefore those who would be willing to waste their lives aboard subs are unlikely to be competent.
The Navy's own materials corroborate this:
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/us ... 1/idc.htmlQuote:
In addition to medical duties, the IDC is designated as the ship’s radiation health officer and is responsible to the commanding officer for administration of radiation health programs including
personnel dosimetry, maintenance of records documenting crew occupational exposure to ionizing radiation, and maintenance of crew health records ensuring the rigorous requirements specified by the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine are met. Most Doc’s will tell you that these duties account for the majority of their time when not dealing with patients or medical issues...
The effectiveness of these standards is validated by the outstanding performance and low attrition rate of NUMI graduates in the fleet...
This title itself holds no true rank, authority, or civilian certification...
There you go. The flip side of having non-doctors administer care on subs is that unlike actual doctors, they have no authority and lack the intellectual training and moral rigor of real physicians. If a doctor is told to do something medically unwise or unethical, he won't do it (and Navy doctors have a minimum rank of O-3, I believe, so they have the authority to back up their decisions). A sub medic doesn't have such discretion. In fact he is
not even a commissioned officer. So in reality your anecdote serves to underscore my point which is that the two qualifications are not comparable.
Quote:
The IDC’s scope of medical practice underway includes all routine medical care that would normally be provided by a family doctor and treatment/stabilization of injuries ranging from minor cuts and bruises to broken bones, closure of complicated wounds, and minor surgical procedures.
Emergency care is not comparable to a holistic understanding of medicine. Knowing how to treat a burn or broken bone or administer an analgesic or antibiotic is not comparable to the much more advanced issues in question.
Plain and simple, if the qualification of being a licensed doctor didn't imply specialized knowledge it wouldn't exist. The qualification is legitimately difficult to obtain and the fact is Dotzilla doesn't have it.
