The Social Media and Critical Care (SMACC) Conference is entering it’s 4th year and will be in Dublin from June 13th – 16th, 2016. That’s right, the conference is returning to the land of Guiness and Mike Cadogan – one of the fathers of the FOAM movement. This conference offers the rare opportunity to unite a number of fields in medicine (EM,
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Abdominal pain is the most frequent presenting symptom in US emergency departments. The current standard care in the ED for upper abdominal pain involves ruling out severe causes (i.e. biliary disease, perforated viscous etc) and consideration of empiric gastric disease treatment with histamine blockers, antacids, or proton-pump inhibitors.
H. pylori is a bacterium that infects the stomach causing dyspepsia.
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Ventricular tachycardia is a potentially lethal dysrhythmia. Expert management is a critical skill for Emergency Physicians.
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Background: Patients with fluid refractory septic shock should be treated with vasoactive medications to improve perfusion. It has become widely accepted in recent years to use norepinephrine as the first-line vasopressor in adults with septic shock. In children, however, there is little research to guide our choice of agent. Dopamine has been used as the first-line agent in children though it has fallen out of favor in adults.
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Insulins are commonly administered in the ED and a comprehensive understanding of their pharmacodynamics is vital.
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Background
Acute pulmonary embolism (PE) is a common disease associated with high degrees of morbidity and mortality. The D-dimer assay has the potential to be a valuable test in the workup of PE as it is sensitive for thrombus formation. Unfortunately, specificity is low and indiscriminate use can lead to increased advanced imaging.
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Lunate dislocations are unusual but have severe morbidity associated with them if the diagnosis is delayed or missed.
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