There appears to be wide agreement that we are not good at providing feedback in medicine. I have attended many seminars and read many papers on this topic, and despite believing this is an essential role in medical education, I still fail routinely. I have received a lot of advice. […]
ebm reviews Rants & Ramblings
49 posts
I love toxicologists, but it’s time for someone to call them out. (I also love ranting. Let’s see if I can get myself cancelled by a group of physicians that are definitely smarter than me.) I am sick of the anti-science rhetoric. Every time a toxicologist takes the stage at […]
The concept of a “deepity” was, I believe, coined by Daniel Dennet in his great book “Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking”. He says, “a deepity is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading […]
Give your patients a break. Nobody is a perfect diagnostician. Not even the best trained physician can determine, with 100% accuracy, which patients have serious pathology. Even with advanced testing, we aren’t close to perfect. However, if you listen to the subtext of breakroom complaints, it seems like we expect […]
There is little doubt that the use of testing has increased dramatically in emergency medicine during my career. Between 2001 and 2010 the use of CT in emergency departments increased 3-fold (and the use of MRI increased 9-fold, but for some reason it is still almost impossible for me to […]
The time has come to learn from the pandemic; to learn from our mistakes (and hopefully a few successes). There are many topics to choose from. In future posts, I plan to be very positive about the tremendous work done by so many colleagues. I will probably also have to […]
It is a gamble we all take. It is a gamble we all occasionally lose. We don’t love having end of life conversations in the emergency department. They can be uncomfortable. They can take time that it feels like we don’t have. They don’t seem like our responsibility, when the […]
The question, “what would you do if this was your family member?”, rubs me the wrong way. I hear it all the time. Patients ask this of their doctors. Colleagues ask it when debating controversial therapies. Superficially, it sounds benign, or perhaps even important, but I think the implications are […]
Might the FAST exam be the most overused test in emergency medicine? If not the most overused (it does have to compete with the white blood cell count after all), perhaps it is the most overrated? Considering the sacrosanct position ultrasound holds in emergency medicine, even asking this question might […]