what actually ARE the first principles? like, what do they consist of? every time i google i just get scholarly articles that are hard to sit and go through haha

drferox:

First principles are boiling a medical problem down to it’s simplest, most basic components. You might not know how to treat every possible condition in every species, because there are a huge amount of different species, but you do have that knowledge in other species and so you can boil things down and extrapolate back.

I’ve discussed using first principles before here, but I don’t think there is a hard and fast list of what they are.

Classic examples would be seeing a condition in a species of bird that you don’t normally treat, but you’ve seen the condition in other species. You can extrapolate because the two species are close enough, but you can’t ever be certain, and with many exotic species there just isn’t huge amounts of drug data to draw from.

So if you want to go back to very basic first principles, you might ask yourself:

• Is the patient alive?
• What species is it most similar to?
• Has it got trauma?
• Is it vomiting?
• Is it under conditioned?
• What does it eat? Is it eating?

And so on for progressively more directed, focused questions.