Before I was a PA, I was an EMT. Let me tell you the big downside of being an EMT. They can't possibly train you in all the stuff you need to know to make a real medical diagnosis. To do that, you need Medical School, PA or NP school. Unfortunately in EMT school, they pretty much ONLY teach you the bad stuff. That's okay for your role, because your role is to watch for the bad stuff, and take them bodily to the hospital for the medical providers to sort out.
Problem is, everything seems bad. I'll give an example. As a young, 20something healthy EMT, I was grocery shopping, and I got into my car. I looked at my stereo, and all the numbers were jumbled up. Damn! Stereo must be broken. Then I looked up at a street sign, which I know reads "NW Market ST". Problem was, what I SAW was "NW _________ St". The middle part was inexplicably missing.
I immediately drove myself to the closest ER (about 5 blocks away) and the symptoms rapildly progressed until the entire left half of my vision was gone. I was completely freaking out, thinking stroke, or retinal detachment, or retinal artery occlusion. All very bad things.
The ER doc comes in, is totally unimpressed and after about a 3 minute history and exam, and says I'm having a painless migraine. He's going to leave and just wait and it should resolve. He refused my pleas for a CT or MRI.
Of course, he was right. 20 minutes later, everything was back to normal. As a Doc, he had enough training to know that a healthy 20something essentially CAN'T have an embolic stroke or retinal artery occlusion and there was no history to suspect retinal detachment and 10-ish percent of all migraines are painless and I was just experiencing the "aura" before my painless migraine. As an EMT I had a list of things it could be, but they were only catastrophic things.
Point being, if I was on a boat at the time, I would have called MAYDAY without a doubt.
Generally the more medical training you have, the better, but there are select cases where it can put you in the "knows just enough to be dangerous" category. It's "possible" that his EMT training helped him to want to push the button on the EPIRB because his list of known possibilities for kiddo's issue were only a select list of bad bad things. At my current level of training and experience, my list of what can be happening to kiddo in similar circumstances includes a lot of benign things...
MedSailor
PS As far as administering the drugs, he was doing that as a non-trained person. He got advice by sat phone to administer them by the Mexican doctor. It's exactly the same as when you go to your doc and he/she prescribes antibiotics. You "administer" them to yourself on their order. Eric didn't unilaterally decide to start giving his kids oral antibiotics and steroids. No IV meds were given.