Dr Know-it-all

I am a Media student but not just any media student, I'm a media student with an interest for medicine and I have volunteered in ambulances for over 2 years. By doing this I have seen how paramedics work extremely hard and perform wonders. However, I also have a fair share of friends studying medicine which usually leads to discussions regarding medical care and the differences from working in an ambulance and working in a hospital. Usually I'm met with an interest but sometimes I meet doctors or medicine students believing they are much better than paramedics. This annoys me. A lot. Recently I heard the argument that there should be a doctor in the ambulance to decide if the person actually needs to go to the hospital or not and according to the person who made this argument paramedics are not educated enough to do that because they only study 3 years. The reason why this annoyed me was not because I have friends that are paramedics, it annoyed me because this person had never set a foot in an ambulance and can therefore not judge what paramedics are capable of doing or not. But to avoid this becoming a rant about how some people are slightly stuck up I will now explain to you why I believe paramedics are more than capable of making decisions in the ambulance and why there is no need for a doctor.

1. The paramedics are trained in only emergency care and their job is to keep the person alive until they get to the hospital. The course involves learning how to deal with an emergency of the place of the accident and in an area that is not designed for performing medical care. There is no need for the paramedics to know everything about medicine since they are not going to use it in any of the situations and they are not doing a degree that gives them an opportunity to specialise in one of the systems of the body, they need to know a little bit about the whole body.
2. Doctors are able to prescribe any medication whilst paramedics are only allowed to give some specific medication. Therefore paramedics don't need to know how all medication work since they do not use it in their job. This means the focus on biology and pharmaceutical parts of the medical degree is completely irrelevant for paramedics.
3. Paramedics do not need to know how to perform surgery which is a part of the medical degree since they are never going to perform it. This means they do not have to study how all that works even though it might be interesting for them to know. But making paramedics go through the whole process of surgery when they won't use those skills in any way is like teaching a teacher to jump a rope, yes it might make them be able to do something extra to make the kids like them but it won't actually help them perform their job.
4. Anyone who wants to go to the hospital should have the right to do that. You can't decide if the person is ill or not by just looking at them. It doesn't matter if you are a doctor, paramedic or a psychic, there might be something there that you can't see. The blood pressure, EKG, sugar level and pulse might seem normal but that doesn't mean everything is right so having a doctor telling them they're fine seems like a ridiculous idea because no one wants to be the person who's told someone their fine and then end up being wrong. 
   

The argument of having someone doing triage in the ambulance was based on the fact that hospitals usually have a lot of people coming in for no reason and they end up being sent home again because they are fine but that is a problem in the hospital system, not with the paramedics. Blaming paramedics for doing their job just seems ignorant and I personally think is an attitude doctors shouldn't have. In the end, they are working side by side with these people and doctors have many paramedics to thank for actually having patients coming in alive to the hospital but maybe that's the problem. Maybe some doctors would rather prefer the people staying at home and die peacefully there because that would mean less work. I know this might seem like I'm generalising doctors. Don't get me wrong, doctors are great but the few of them criticising people that has a degree that took less time should stop and consider what they say before they offend people that are working as hard as them.
A doctor is not better at medicine than a paramedic, they are just good at different things within medical care and they should leave each other to do what they are trained to do. That is why we have seperate jobs. Just because it's connected doesn't mean they can understand each other and should therefore not judge each other either because after all, they rely on each other to actually keep people alive.