As usual, a random smattering of articles. This group was presented as part of a live podcast recording at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Australia, where I was honoured to be invited to be the WG Smith visiting lecturer. The guests helped select the papers, which means they are […]
Cardiac Arrest
24 posts
Back again with an eclectic collection of papers that might improve your practice, make you think, or just help you fall asleep at night. (Podcast available here.)
I can almost guarantee that everyone has heard about this paper already. It is an exciting topic. It is resuscitation and gadgets. It is emergency medicine in the New England Journal (which is great, despite how atrocious this journal often is.) So does double sequential defibrillation help? Let’s look at […]
A true rarity: An RCT demonstrating a mortality benefit, but is it too good to be true? Matchett G, Gasanova I, Riccio CA, Nasir D, Sunna MC, Bravenec BJ, Azizad O, Farrell B, Minhajuddin A, Stewart JW, Liang LW, Moon TS, Fox PE, Ebeling CG, Smith MN, Trousdale D, Ogunnaike […]
I have covered post-arrest hypothermia at length on this blog. (For example, here, here and here.) Although we are still waiting for definitive answers, I have always been rather skeptical, and the more trials we see, the more certain it is becoming that this whole enterprise was just a waste […]
It’s that time again. A roundup of the most interesting emergency medicine articles I have read in the last few months.
We recently released an Emergency Medicine Cases Journal Jam episode covering all the available literature on ‘therapeutic’ hypothermia. Unfortunately, JAMA didn’t think to inform us that they had another big RCT in the pipeline, so the “CAPITAL CHILL” trial got left out of our summary. CAPITAL CHILL is somewhat unique, […]
My morning ritual of reading articles over coffee has transformed somewhat, such that there is a lot more playing with an infant, and a lot less evidence based medicine. Although the coffee isn’t going anywhere, it is usually cold by the time I have a free moment to get to […]
Despite ‘therapeutic’ hypothermia’s widespread use, the evidence for the practice has always been weak. I went through that evidence here. At that point, I tried to be optimistic, given the potentially positive results of the HYPERION trial, but I also noted the many problems with HYPERION that left me skeptical. […]