Scalp lacerations over hair-bearing areas require wound closure, usually with staples. An alternative technique is the Hair Apposition Technique, also known as the HAT trick [1, 2]. This technique provides a more cost-effective, faster, and less painful approach to scalp laceration repair. Imagine the scalp hairs as suture ties already embedded in the skin.
My poor camera is finally back from the Canon service shop. With now $211 less in my bank account, my Canon Eos Rebel XTi is back! Apparently SLR cameras don’t do well when bounced off the floor. In my defense, it was small bounce…
Distal radius fractures traditionally require a sugar tong splint to prevent the patient from ranging the wrist and elbow. The sugar tong splint essentially sandwiches the forearm with a splint, folded at the elbow. At this elbow fold, however, the splint often uncomfortably and inconveniently buckles and wrinkles when a wrap is applied.
A common problem that emergency physicians share and struggle over is the circadian “dysrhythmia” of working random morning, afternoon, and night shifts. Shift work is the blessing and curse of our profession. I have yet to figure out the best way to adjust back to the daytime world after night shifts. Do you have any tricks?
Journals use the numerical “Impact Factor” as an indirect quantitative measure of a journal’s importance in the medical field and scientific literature. Thompson Scientific calculates the impact factor scores annually. This score provides journals with bragging rights, especially when it comes to marketing. Be aware that there are ways to manipulate the numbers a little and thus brings the true value of this score into question.
The impact factor is a calculation of how frequent a journal’s articles are cited in a 2-year period. As an example, the 2009 impact factor for a journal would be:
The ambiguous issue is how the denominator of “citable items” is determined. Basically articles which qualify as potentially citable items include original research, reviews, proceedings, and notes. These do not include such items as editorials, coresspondences, and errata. Sometimes it’s unclear which articles don’t qualify. The more articles that you exclude, the smaller your denominator and thus the higher (and better) the impact factor.
Below are impact factors of several journals, relevant to those interested in publishing in EM and medical education. In addition to impact factors, you should also consider the journal’s general focus when deciding where to submit your manuscript. If you read through several back-issues, you will get a sense of each journal’s “flavor”:
The olfactory nerve of an emergency physician is exposed to a broad range of smells in the Emergency Department. I’ve learned that the stinky-feet problem is a commonality amongst ED’s around the world! I call it the “toxic sock syndrome”. There are two remedies which I’ve been told of:
What part of your job do you love the most?
In academic emergency medicine, nothing energizes me more than brainstorming with creative, like-minded, and motivated people. From my experience, most of my past major projects have all started in similar informal, small-group settings.
For instance, the CDEM organization was built when a small group of undergraduate medical educators went to dinner during a SAEM conference. We conspired to build something bigger and better. Two years later now, we now have over 100 members and are a new member of the major interdisciplinary organization Alliance for Clinical Education.
1. This week, I got a call from Chad Kessler (Univ of Illinois-Chicago) who was interested in bringing medical education more to the forefront of EM. We brainstormed about building a “thinktank” of like-minded educators interested in pushing education to the 21st century. There is so much to be learned in the literature outside of EM and medicine in general. I suggested building a dynamic database somewhere to list the ongoing educational projects and research in EM. We too often work in silos. Collaboration is key in educational research. Any ideas how to build a database that everyone would participate in?
2. As a member of KidsCareEverywhere (KCE), I am headed off to Vietnam this month to help teach a conference jointly hosted by our organization and UCSF. This conference will assess pediatricians’ knowledge before and after learning a new decision-support software PEMSoft. The members of the KCE team met for the last time for a dry-run of the conference and a brainstorming session to anticipate potential hiccups.
One problem which I’m still a little worried about is the access to laptops and electricity. Because we are testing the participants on their ability to navigate the new technology, we need everyone to have their own laptop. We doubt that participants will all have laptops, but we have backup plans to share. We’re more concerned about poor battery life for the existing laptops and something as seemingly simple as access to electrical outlets. I have a feeling we’ll be buying long extension cords while in Vietnam.
Check out our new 1 GB USB thumb drives that just came in! We are giving out to the participants, preloaded with the PEMSoft user manual, hospital-specific documents, and the lecture slides.
3. For our residency program, I’m running the Education Area of Distinction (AOD). There are a variety of AODs available, which allow our residents to “specialize” in a niche in EM. I have two rock star residents in the Education AOD – Liz Brown and Eric Silman. We met to discuss how we were going to take the education world by storm. It always helps to do this over a BBQ meal.
iPhone photo of the inaugural meeting at Baby Blues BBQ. Sorry it’s so blurry – Digital SLR cameras apparently do don’t well when dropped on the floor. In the Canon shop.The first project, spearheaded by Eric, involves posting interesting cases onto this blog. I’m going to open up a Saturday slot called “A Case Presentation from UCSF-SFGH”. Every Saturday, a short case from the residency program’s Follow-Up Conference series will be highlighted to illustrate key clinical pearls.