Dr. Creed: The feel good policy of oxygenation

Warning: What follows is top secret information surreptitiously leaked to me via one of the nations elite pulmonologists from an elite teaching hospital. Read at your own risk. This is not edited, yet explains the reason for needless bronchodilator for patients with no respiratory disorders.

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Section B8

Forget the passenger seats on a train theory, because it's all hogwash.  You know the theory, because respiratory therapists use it all the time to try to convince us oxygen isn't necessary unless the SpO2 is less than 90 percent.  

The passenger theory says that if there are 30 seats on a train, you can only seat 30 passengers.  It doesn't matter if you put 100 passengers on that train, only 30 will get seated.  They use this analogy when complaining about us placing supplemental oxygen on all post anaesthetic and patients suffering from chest pain.  

We physicians go by the feel good philosophy, where if it sounds good it must be true.  So we oxygenate whenever it sounds good to do so. So when a patient has chest pain, we must oxygenate these patients because, somehow, this must get more oxygen to the dead and dying part of the heart.

Now, sure it's true we're ignoring that dead tissue won't oxygenate the heart no matter what, but this ignores our "feel good" policy. 

Based on this new "fact," physicians must be taught to place all patients complaining of chest pain, or all patients post anaesthetic, on supplemental oxygen -- period.

If some future political faction, like ACLS or Medicare, decides to only oxygenate patients with an SpO2 of 90 percent or lower, we must be skeptical of these claims.