Irked. The headline Irked me.
Alzheimer’s Mortality Lowest for Taxi, Ambulance Drivers
Some researchers out of Harvard Medical School did a study of over 443 occupations and found that taxi drivers and ambulance drivers had the lowest rates of dying from Alzheimer’s.
Their big theory is that the brain required to navigate through busy streets provides protection in some way against Alzheimer’s.
Novel theory, but not enough to make me forget about the driver dis.
Ambulance drivers. When I read that I fired off a comment:
Ambulance Driver is not an occupation any more than police car driver or fire truck driver are occupations. Paramedics and EMTs are trained medical professionals who assess and treat sick and injured patients. That they need a vehicle to get to a 911 call and get to the hospital does make their occupation driver.
Then I went and read the actual paper. It seems the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a category called Ambulance Drivers and Attendants, Except Emergency Medical Technicians. This is the category they used, not Emergency Medical Technicians or Paramedics.
According to the bureau there are 10 ambulance drivers in Connecticut and 11,520 nationwide, as opposed to 167, 040 EMTs nationwide and 98,770 paramedics nationwide. What these ambulance drivers actually do if they are not at least EMTs, I don’t know. Maybe they are talking about wheelchair van drivers. Ambulances, at least those in high volume areas in our state, and I expect in most of the country, all have at least 2 EMTs in a crew. Volunteer ambulances may have an EMT and an EMR (emergency medical responder), but there is no “ambulance driver” category of certification.
I am mistrustful of these academic papers that crunch data without really understanding the real world categories.
I was a taxi driver myself for a year in Washington DC/Alexandria Virginia. I worked 12 hour days six days a week. I was on the go all the time, endless driving. My Paramedic/Ambulance Driver job, I don’t hardly drive at all, even in a busy urban 911 system. The amount of driving an EMT or Paramedic does pales in comparison to what a busy taxi driver does. We treat patients, deal with triage lines at the hospital, write paperwork and clean and resupply. Additionally there aren’t many of us who make a full career out of it.
The paper looked at people who died between 2020 and 2022 and had “ambulance driver” listed as their occupation. Given how often, we are called ambulance drivers by the uniformed, I expect a good number of those who died were likely not “ambulance drivers” but EMTs and paramedics.
So, maybe you are thinking, hey chill out, and enjoy the good news. If they are actually writing about people who have ever driven a 911 ambulance, you don’t have to worry about getting Alzheimer’s.
But here’s the kicker. The mean death age of the “ambulance drivers” was 64 years old. Most of them died before the age when Alzheimer’s typically strikes. Now the authors claim they then did an analysis to take all that into consideration and it still looks like the Alzheimer’s risk for ambulance drivers is way low.
Check out these graphs made by Dr. Percy Wilson, who writes and interesting article, The Curious Reason Taxi Drivers Are Protected From Alzheimer’s, about the journal paper in Medscape:
Each dot represents one of the 443 occupations. Blue is ambulance driver.
Sadly, the median age of 64 for “ambulance drivers” doesn’t strike me as unusual. I have seen too many of my fellow “ambulance drivers” die young from cancer, suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, and heart attacks.
I picture funeral home technicians coming and picking up a long dead body in a spare one room apartment with a half empty liquor bottle on the table next to an empty take out carton, an old TV on with a flickering screen playing long ago reruns.
“What did he do?” the man who signs the death certificate asks later.
“I don’t know, I think he was an ambulance driver.”