Jul 17, 2026 · 39 min · 10 segments
Cody and Josh discuss a recent blog post about COPD patients and the care that we provide them. They talk about concepts that are not commonly talked about in initial paramedic education and how we…
Yeah, man, this one started kind of like a lot of other blogs that I've done or things that I've written is challenging the way we were taught things, because what I've done, you know, here I am some amount of school, some amount of years outside of school now where I'm like, man, why didn't why didn't I know that? And to your point, when I started doing MIH stuff, a large population, a large portion of my patient population are COPD patients.
And I was kind of floored at how little or how poorly they understood their disease.
And then when I would try to educate them, I was trying to educate them like, like a paramedic, like I was like a paramedic in paramedic school of, oh, there's bronchoconstriction and this is why you're short of breath and blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, man, I just don't, I don't have the depth for this.
So I took it all the way back to the beginning, went all the way back to the most basic thing that I could remember being taught about COPD patients.
And that was the good old pink puffer and the blue bloater.
And I think we can see the, I can still see the slides.
Just like I said in the post, I can still see the slides of some skinny, wiry, old farmer looking guy trying to look like he's
short of breath.
Yep.
It's
in the
same, all the same
books.
Yep.
Or the pink puffer who's a little bit bigger, maybe a little more barrel tested kind of guy.
And I think that's a great way to, to tease apart like two L, two of the pieces of, so the blue bloater, pink puffer thing.
And I think it works great, you know, in the, in the front of the classroom where you're trying to like tease apart the different diseases and the different disease processes and kind of how it's affecting the patient.
But we don't, We don't see it that way out in the field.
And I'll say this.
I've never seen one or the other.
Never seen it.
I've never.
This is the pink puffer that they talked about at school.
This is the blue bloater.
Yeah, man, this one started kind of like a lot of other blogs that I've done or things that I've written is challenging the way we were taught things, because what I've done, you know, here I am some amount of school, some amount of years outside of school now where I'm like, man, why didn't why didn't I know that? And to your point, when I started doing MIH stuff, a large population, a large portion of my patient population are COPD patients.
And I was kind of floored at how little or how poorly they understood their disease.
And then when I would try to educate them, I was trying to educate them like, like a paramedic, like I was like a paramedic in paramedic school of, oh, there's bronchoconstriction and this is why you're short of breath and blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, man, I just don't, I don't have the depth for this.
So I took it all the way back to the beginning, went all the way back to the most basic thing that I could remember being taught about COPD patients.
And that was the good old pink puffer and the blue bloater.
And I think we can see the, I can still see the slides.
Just like I said in the post, I can still see the slides of some skinny, wiry, old farmer looking guy trying to look like he's
short of breath.
Yep.
It's
in the
same, all the same
books.
Yep.
Or the pink puffer who's a little bit bigger, maybe a little more barrel tested kind of guy.
And I think that's a great way to, to tease apart like two L, two of the pieces of, so the blue bloater, pink puffer thing.
And I think it works great, you know, in the, in the front of the classroom where you're trying to like tease apart the different diseases and the different disease processes and kind of how it's affecting the patient.
But we don't, We don't see it that way out in the field.
And I'll say this.
I've never seen one or the other.
Never seen it.
I've never.
This is the pink puffer that they talked about at school.
This is the blue bloater.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.