The First10EM monthly wrap up is a place for me to share updates about the website, about my academic life, and also interesting content, such as books, podcasts, and other FOAMed, that I have encountered in the prior month (or now quarter). Obviously the format means the focus is mostly on content I have found, but I hope the community gets engaged in the comments, sharing books, podcasts, FOAMed, or anything else that you think would benefit or delight the broader emergency medicine community.
I don’t know exactly how readers feel, but I distinctly dislike the look of advertisements on First10EM. That being said, I need to cover the costs of running the site somehow. There are currently 31 people supporting the site on Patreon. If that number gets to 40, I will turn the ads back off.
In addition to the amazing Patreons that have kept First10EM alive, there is now a YouTube membership program that will give you early access to videos. All supporters of First10EM will also get early access to the Research Roundup articles, and the opportunity to ask questions or make comments that might find their way into the BroomeDocs podcast.
There seems to be a seismic shift away from Twitter and towards Bluesky. I think that is a fabulous idea, and hopefully will be deleting Twitter altogether in the future. If you jump on the Bluesky bandwagon, I am: @first10em.bsky.social
There are a number of new YouTube videos, which judging by the traffic, I know a lot of people have missed out on.
Perhaps the most important is a talk I have been giving for a number of years is entitled “Evidence Based Medicine is easy” and is now available on YouTube:
Only for the nerdiest readers, but I enjoyed playing with a few AI tools to try to improve my EBM game:
The most important clinical video is probably about how the PECARN c-spine rule is likely to cause a lot of harm (and should not be used):
But the video on use of radiation for imaging in pregnancy is also important, and probably practise changing for a lot of people:
And long time readers will know my opinions about adenosine, but if you still see it being widely used in your department, feel free to share this video:
What I am reading
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor by David Landes was a really interesting read. It discusses the way that culture might have shaped the trajectory of countries, and explains why a handful came to accumulate the vast majority of the wealth over the last 1000 years. I lack any knowledge of history as a subject, so I am sure I am missing obvious and well-known rebuttals to the arguments made here, but it was still a very interesting read.
Given the amount of snake oil and garbage being sold using concepts like probiotics and the microbiome, I sort of expected to hate the book “I Contain Multitudes” by Ed Yong. I was wrong. It is a fascinating and well balanced look at the world of microbiome that actually somewhat changed the way I look at the world. Highly recommended.
I am still mulling over how I feel about The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert Sawyer. (I love Robert Sawyer, and his WWW series is among my favourite science fiction series of all time.) This book is so realistic that it borders on a biography for the first half, and even the science fiction is hyper-realistic for the first 95% of the book, and then it takes an incredibly dramatic turn in the final pages.
Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad is a heart wrenching book about the journey of a young person through their cancer diagnosis, treatment, and ultimately the difficult task of rejoining life on the other side. Highly recommend (although maybe don’t read it on an aeroplane if you don’t like tearing up in public.)
Howling Dark is the second book in the Sun Eater series. It is another good epic science fiction novel, and I will definitely finish the series at some point, but I feel like I have read too many space operas recently, and so may need a break before coming back for the third instalment.
I also read all 3 books of Robert Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallax trilogy: Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids. I liked the WWW series more than HHH, but I think it was an interesting way to discuss politics, philosophy, and religion by comparing modern humanity against a hypothetical parallel universe in which Neandethrals were the surviving species on Earth.
Interesting media
Although I think democracy is a fundamentally illogical form of government (mob rule codified makes very little sense), I found this video on the underlying mathematics of democracy to be interesting. Assuming we are stuck with democracy, I think people should have strong opinions about the voting system used. If you don’t, this is a nice primer, with the twist that there are some paradoxes that make most systems mathematically impossible. (This recommendation was made well before the American election, and so is not a knee jerk response, despite the timing of this blog post.)
I don’t know why I spend so much time watching videos about physics on YouTube. They don’t impact my day to day life at all. It is probably because it boggles my mind how little I understand about the world, when you really start to push. This video discusses a question that seems really obvious in normal life, but actually isn’t: when you start moving one end up an object (like a solid bar or baseball bat), how long does it take for the opposite end to start moving?
Or maybe watch a unique chaotic and ADHD driven video about water and rocks. (Yes, I know that doesn’t sound interesting at all, but it was.)
I have been calling out Elon Musk as a snake oil salesman long before it was cool. I came across this website highlighting the constant claims that full self-driving Teslas will be available “in 6 months”, or within 2 years, going back all the way to 2016, and I found the catalogue of lies interesting and telling.
What are the odds of life elsewhere in the universe? How many of our current conclusions are based on the anthropic principle? This video is an interesting recap of the science and maths trying to extrapolate evidence of life’s creation on earth to the likelihood of the same process happening elsewhere.
My Favourite FOAMed this month
The Emergency Medicine Cases podcast on understanding and improving culture was fantastic.
Quotes or Thoughts
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar
Or similarly, stolen from somewhere on the internet but I don’t have the original source (I love the line “I think it will start poorly, but who knows how it will end”:
“The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.” — Isaac Asimov
In a sea of day to day tasks and attention sucking modern distractions, it is very easy to lose track of the big picture in life. One benefit of being an emergency physician is that the fragility of life is always on display; always front of mind. However, we are good at separating work from life, and so the lesson may not compute. Life is short. I don’t want to waste it, but it feels like the world conspires against me, with endless addictive and time wasting options at my fingertips. So I keep a memento mori calendar near my desk, as a constant reminder of how much of my life has passed, and how much time I might (if I am lucky) have left. Each box represents a week of life, with 80 years represented. It doesn’t always keep me on track, but it always makes me think.
“We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…life is long if you know how to use it.” – Seneca
