Teaching on a clinical shift can sometimes be difficult: it’s busy, everyone’s running around and it’s hard to capture a trainees attention. Recently, on twitter, Amal Mattu (@amalmattu) has been posting pictures of his white board teaching: discrete pearls written down and shared with anyone who walks by. The pearls are often prompted by patients presenting during that shift but they don’t have to be.
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This post delves into the diagnosis and emergent management of olecranon fractures.
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This blog post is a companion piece to our core content piece on tracheostomy emergencies published earlier this week.
Like many horror stories this one began on one of my first shifts as a newly minted community doc. It was 11:00 pm and the only services in house at this hour are Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine.
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Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common dysrhythmias encountered in the ED. The management of recent-onset AF and atrial flutter (AFl) in the ED continues to be debated. The discussion centers on whether patients with recent-onset AF should be rhythm controlled (e.g. converted back to sinus rhythm) or rate controlled only. This debate was showcased in a point-counterpoint in Annals of Emergency Medicine in 2011 (Stiell 2011,
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This post explores the most common tracheostomy issues encountered in the ED with practical tips for management.
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Intravenous (IV) nitroglycerin (NTG) infusion is one of the mainstay treatments in acute pulmonary edema (aka acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF)), but is associated with increased hospital length of stay (LOS) and health care costs. Optimal NTG dosing isn’t established though physiologically, higher infusion doses (> 100 mcg/min) are helpful as they affect both afterload and preload.
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