Emergency medicine: Why an emergency doctor jokes about his missions

interview

Lifesaving
Can emergency medicine be fun? Absolutely!

Lüder Warnken is an emergency physician and comedian. Why the two go well together and can even save lives.

Dr. Warnken, since when have you been working in the emergency services?
I have been an emergency doctor for twelve years now, but before that I worked as a paramedic for many years.

How did you come to create a stage program as comedian have developed?
Whether at school, during training or at university: It has always annoyed me when people stand in front of me who are extremely competent in their field, but who are not able to directly address and inspire their respective audience.

Does the audience believe that you are a doctor?
I've been doing this for many years now, but no matter where I perform, I have to make it clear at the beginning of the show: I'm really an emergency doctor and not the janitor who plays the doctor role.

Ki in the doctor’s office
I met the family doctor of the future

03.08.2024

Your show is called “Shit, an emergency.” Is it okay to make jokes about such a serious topic as emergency medicine?
When you think of emergency services, you always think of death and the devil, amputated legs and other disasters. But there are also a lot of funny things that happen there. At some point I started collecting these stories and presenting them on small stages. As a comedian, I was able to test what people find funny and where the limits of black humor are.

Which stories bring the maximum laughter?
A classic is cardiac massage. If a relative suddenly has a cardiac arrest and you call the control center, you will usually receive the following instructions: uncover your upper body and start pressing regularly on the chest. Colleagues from the arriving emergency services often report that the first responders kneel on the floor with their upper bodies bare and work on the victim's chest. Some control centers therefore now say: “…please uncover the upper body of the person lying there.”

And what can viewers learn from you besides having fun?
Many people you speak to at a party, for example, will openly admit that they no longer know anything about first aid. At the same time, they say: I wouldn't even sit in on a course like that. The organizers used to get a lot of things wrong. For me, this led to the question: How can you reach these people and teach them important medical information? That was, in a way, the birth of the show.

Is the show’s knowledge enough to save lives?
It is completely clear to me that a show with 500 people is no substitute for emergency training. But I am trying to convey the aha effect: It is much easier to help than I always thought.

What puts people off from taking a traditional first aid course?
In the past, we have done two things fundamentally wrong in first aid courses. Firstly, we have taught first aiders that in order to help in an emergency, you have to be aware of and be able to differentiate between a whole range of illnesses. In extreme heat, for example, heat stroke, heat exhaustion, sunstroke, etc. In an emergency, however, this differential diagnosis plays no role at all for the first aider.

The second thing is that we have been extremely concerned about the issue of failure to provide assistance. We have threatened first responders that if they do nothing or do something wrong, they will go to “first aid hell”. This has led to first responders in Germany being very unsettled because they have a thousand things on their minds. We urgently need more first responders because only then can we bridge the 7 to 8 minutes until the emergency services arrive on site.

Does that mean that people would rather do nothing than do something wrong?
That's exactly what we unintentionally provoked. Of course, an emergency will always be exciting for a layperson because they happen very rarely and often affect your own family.

What would help the helper?
Simplifying the process has the greatest influence on whether someone helps or not. In 2013, just 17 percent of bystanders in Germany started CPR in the event of cardiac arrest. The German Society for Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine concluded that we must simplify the process of closed resuscitation by laypeople, and as part of the “Save a Life” campaign, it removed ventilation from the process.

And what effect did that have?
The current figures for 2024 show that on average 50 percent of bystanders in Germany now begin resuscitation when someone has collapsed.