Galveston County Daily News, March 31, 2009
UTMB’s Dr. Susan McCammon, in this guest column, writes that the use of live animals is the best way to train doctors in emergency life-saving procedures. “It has been 10 years since I came scalpel to skin with the pig in my ATLS course. … I can say, with confidence, that what makes someone good at doing a ‘slash trach’ is hours and hours spent on the inside and the outside of the human neck and knowing the fastest and best ways to get from one to the other. Barring that level of experience, I would wish for your physician the crisis-management skills gained from hours in a simulator lab and the tactile experience and psychological confidence gained from having already performed his or her ‘first’ tracheotomy on a living creature.”