Welcome new ALiEM-CORD Fellow Dr. Sameed Shaikh

It is with great pleasure that announce our inaugural 2014-15 ALiEM-CORD Fellow for Social Media and Digital Scholarship, Dr. Sameed Shaikh, from Sinai-Grace Emergency Medicine Residency Program/Detroit Medical Center. As a PGY-2, he already has an impressive multimedia skill set, including website design, video editing, photography, and electronic music composition. He is currently using his skills for good rather than evil at his residency program to match medical education and medicine in general with currently available technological solutions.

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By Michelle Lin, MD|2019-01-28T21:50:30-08:00Jun 25, 2014|Medical Education, Social Media & Tech|

MEdIC Series: The Case of the Exasperated Educator – Expert Review and Curated Commentary

The Case of the Exasperated Educator presented an attending at the end of a difficult shift with a learner that just didn’t seem to “get it.” As the new attending coming on shift, how can we help our colleague and his student? How can we avoid getting ourselves into a similar situation? No matter patient we are, odds are that we will all find ourselves in these roles at some point or another. Check out the ALiEM community’s discussion of the case.

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By Brent Thoma, MD MA|2019-02-19T18:08:56-08:00Jun 6, 2014|MEdIC series|

Research Figures Demystified: Bland-Altman Plot

While working your shift in a small community ED, you overhear that EMS is on their way to you with a five-year-old child in respiratory distress after eating a peanut butter sandwich. Anticipating the patient to be in anaphylactic shock, you and the senior resident begin planning the course of action. The resident asks, “how much do you think a five-year-old weighs?” While you begin fumbling for your Broselow tape, a nurse seated near you confidently responds, “That’s easy, just count your fingers! One, three, five. Ten, fifteen, twenty! The child weighs approximately twenty kilograms!”.

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By Derek Sifford|2016-12-19T10:43:59-08:00Jun 5, 2014|Expert Peer Review (Non-Clinical), Pre Publication Critique (Nonclinical), Statistics & Epidemiology|

Simulation Trick of the Trade: Bleeding Cricothyroidotomy Model

One advantage of simulation as an educational tool is the re-creation of cognitive and emotional stresses in caring for patients. Doing this for a high fidelity scenario is relatively easy – add additional patients, make a them loud, combative, or otherwise cantankerous, and add interruptions for good measure. However, when training for procedures in the simulation lab, we practice the procedure in isolation on a “task trainer” without cognitive and emotional stress for context. An off-the-shelf task trainer can do a superb job of teaching the mechanics of performing a procedure, but they lack complexity necessary to train for performing the procedure under stress. (more…)

By Jeffrey Hill, MD|2016-11-11T19:21:07-08:00Jun 3, 2014|Medical Education, Simulation, Tricks of the Trade|

Critical Thinking: Minimizing NOT knowing what you do not know

Socratic questioning, a dialectic approach to acquiring knowledge, has been around for ages. If done appropriately, it’s a rigorous method of learning. Questioning reveals our knowledge base, reasoning, and want for clarification; invites a dialogue; and establishes a relationship with others. Socratic questioning can also aid in the development of critical thinking.

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By Javier Benitez, MD|2026-06-16T16:05:25-07:00Jun 1, 2014|Medical Education|

MEdIC Series: The Case of the Exasperated Educator

Picture courtesy of wstera, Flickr Creative Commons

Image credit: wstera

Teaching in the emergency department can be a challenge. Distractions and interruptions are everywhere and there always seem to be more things to do than there are people to do them. These challenges are magnified when our learners are struggling. In The Case of the Exasperated Educator, we will discuss these issues and how we, as educators in emergency medicine, can address them as effectively as possible.

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By Brent Thoma, MD MA|2017-01-04T18:32:43-08:00May 30, 2014|MEdIC series|

Assessment in medical education: Finding the signal in the noise

This past December it was reported in the Harvard Crimson that the median grade at their prestigious University was an A-.¹ A flood of articles followed bemoaning grade inflation at educational institutions with a former Harvard President noting cheekily that “the most unique honor you could graduate with was none”.² This might be alright if well-developed criterion-based instruments are used to grade the students, but given the variability in courses taught at the University and difficulty of developing such tools, it is unlikely. That being the case, if the median is an A-, one wonders how sub-par performance must be to fail.

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By Brent Thoma, MD MA|2026-06-16T16:05:18-07:00May 24, 2014|Education Articles, Expert Peer Review (Non-Clinical), Medical Education|