Until I moved to New Zealand, I honestly thought that orthostatic vitals signs were dead. I never bothered to cover the evidence, because I thought we had all agreed they were pretty useless. However, in my current hospital, the trainees seem to routinely perform orthostatics, and the admitting medicine doctors […]
EM literature (critical appraisals)
85 posts
Here is another collection of the articles I have found interesting in my reading from the last couple months. For this edition of the Research Roundup we have TB screening, exercise for concussion, conflict of interest, gestalt for ACS, and so much more. Podcast version over on BroomeDocs.
Clinician gestalt is one of those terms that people either love or hate. Lovers will point out how, almost every time that it is studied, gestalt is at least as accurate as validated clinical decision tools. Haters will lament the inclusion of gestalt in decision tools like the Well’s score, […]
This month, I was honoured to be invited back on Dr. Jeannette Wolfe’s incredible podcast “seX and whY”. We chatted about a couple papers that looked at sex differences in the management and outcomes of cardiac arrest and STEMI. This is a brief summary of the papers we discussed.
Here is another collection of the articles I have found interesting in my reading from the last month or so. For this edition of the Research Roundup we have status epilepticus, nocebos, the pink lady, McGyver bias, and so much more. Podcast version over on BroomeDocs.
This will be the final post this week about status epilepticus. I have long argued that our current status algorithms leave too many patients seizing for too long. I updated my suggested alternative algorithm this week and added a longer supplemental post explaining the reasons that I suggest early anesthetic […]
Hemoptysis can be scary. I covered the emergency medicine approach to massive hemoptysis in one of the early posts on First10EM. However, even when the hemoptysis is small volume, it can be quite distressing to patients and clinicians alike. This paper asks whether using nebulized tranexamic acid (or TXA) for […]
The “pink lady” or “GI cocktail”, a combination of an antacid and viscous lidocaine, is both much loved and much hated in emergency medicine. Some practitioners use it as a matter of routine. Others warn against it, for fear that it can lead to misdiagnosis in the setting of MI. […]
Status epilepticus is associated with a high degree of morbidity and mortality. Approximately ⅓ of patients have long term neurologic sequela, and mortality is 3-5%. (Chin 2006; Raspall-Chaure 2006) First line treatment is with benzodiazepines, but benzos will fail approximately 30-40% of the time. (Appleton 2008) Therefore, an effective second […]