A new season is upon us again — the 2016 EM residency match season! This EM Match Advice video has program directors reflecting back on the 2015 match year, lessons learned, and advice for the 2016 applicants. Watch, learn, digest, and send us some comments.
We are incredibly excited to announce the development of our newest project — ALiEMU. This top-secret project has been in the works for only 3 months, but has gained incredible momentum thanks to our all-star team, led by Dr. Chris Gaafary, who is our ALiEMU Chief of Design and Development… while he is not busy being an incoming EM chief resident at the University of Tennessee.
What is ALiEMU? The one-liner is: A free educational website which hosts free, on-demand e-courses, featuring the AIR series as the inaugural course.
Dr. Michael Gisondi has recruited another all-star cast of residency program leaders around the United States to share their sage wisdom about the Visiting Student Application Service (VSAS). This centralized process to coordinate visiting clerkship rotations first began in 2008 and now almost all medical schools participate. Because anecdotally the VSAS application process has been challenging, we gathered some experts to share their insights in a podcast.
Who has NOT heard of the Essentials of Emergency Medicine (EEM) conference? It is one of the largest live EM educational conferences in the world with over 2,000 attendees that I have had the pleasure to speak at a few times. The conference planners, led by Dr. Paul Jhun and Dr. Mel Herbert, are creating an amazing opportunity for U.S. EM residents to attend their upcoming EEM conference at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas (October 13-15, 2015).
Based on the successes of our 2014-15 ALiEM-EMRA (for medical students), ALiEM-CORD (for residents), and ALiEM-AAEM Young Physicians fellowships, we are thrilled to be launching the 2015 ALiEM-AgileMD Educational Design Fellowship! The application process for this virtual fellowship is now open.
We at ALiEM are incredibly excited to publicly announce the 2015-16 ALiEM Chief Resident (CR) Incubator. Every single year, I have seen Chief Residents struggle with their new role as a near-peer leader in the residency program. Because Chief Residents are generally high-functioning individuals, they usually figure it out as the year progresses. Why is it that we can’t we do better and prepare them for what is to come?
Traditionally in medical school, it is taught that lower extremity deep tendon reflexes for L4 and S1 nerve root levels can be elicited by tapping on the patella and Achilles tendons. It was just taught that L5 didn’t have a reflex to check. Knowing if an L5 radiculopathy existed would be especially helpful when assessing a patient for a potential lumbar disc herniation where a careful lower extremity neurologic exam is important. It turns out one can actually check for a L5 reflex.