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Originally Posted by The Reaper
If you are thinking of driving around with a bag of goodies looking for people to treat, you might want to lawyer up and get some legal counsel first.
Good Samaritan laws only cover so much care.
TR
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You mean driving around looking for people to treat isn't a viable hobby?
Many years ago, I was out driving around late at night, and was passed by a car travelling in excess of 100 mph, swerving from ditch to ditch. Awhile later, I came to a tee-intersection, and happened to see a glint of tail-light way off in the woods, and noticed that there was a lot of dust and smoke in the air. I did some quick math (2+2=4), parked, grabbed my flashlight, and went to investigate. Following the car's trajectory, I found trees that were broken off 6-10 feet above the ground, and a trail of car parts. At the car, I found two females who were about as f*ucked up as you can be and still be alive. They had, in a drunken stupor and at high speed, blown through the intersection, driven their car across a the ditch, impacted an embankment, gone over a fence, and into the trees in the middle of nowhere. Both women were unconscious, and the driver had open fractures of her upper extremities, head and facial lacerations, leg fractures, and was not breathing. The passenger was packed under the dash, her skull was degloved, she was bleeding out from her head, and she had multiple fractures.
To make a long story short, when the paramedics arrived about 45 minutes later, both victims were still alive, semi-conscious, and stable. The EMS guys were very impressed with my work, and told me so. They were a bit taken aback by the clamps sticking out of the passengers head, but when I showed them the size of the bleeders I had clamped off, and the inch of blood on the car floor, they got it.
Unfortunately, the Highway Patrol arrived at the same time as EMS. I'm kneeling, covered in blood. The cop takes one look at me, the two women layed out, piles of bloody bandages and wrappers, and the clamps sticking out of this woman's head bandages, and the first words out of his mouth are "Are you a Doctor?". I replied "I was for the last 45 minutes". The cop starts going off on me about practicing without a licence and gets genuinely pissed because, in his opinion, I've gone well beyond simply providing first aid. Things went badly for me from there.
Anyway, in the end, the only reason things worked out was because of the statements of the EMS personnel and the ER docs. They were willing to testify that had it not been for my actions, neither woman would have survived. It was made very clear to me that had one or both died, I probably would have gone to jail.