Using the slit lamp can be a challenge to learn, especially if you haven’t seen pathology before. In checking for anterior uveitis (i.e. iritis), you need to look for “cell and flare”. In theory, you know that you are looking for inflammatory cells and “flare”, which resembles a light beam being filtered through smoke.
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Patients present with acute strokes to the Emergency Department. Time is of the essence to obtain a rapid neurologic exam, draw labs, get CT imaging, and consulting a neurologist especially if the patient presents within 3 hours of onset. To help the neurologist determine whether the patient should get thrombolytics, calculating a NIH Stroke Scale score is useful.w
In this installment of the Paucis Verbis (In a Few Words) e-card series, here is the NIHSS scoresheet.
| Score 0 | No stroke |
|---|---|
| Score 1-4 | Minor stroke |
| Score 5-15 | Moderate stroke |
| Score 16-20 | Moderate-severe stroke |
| Score 21+ | Severe stroke |
Go to ALiEM (PV) Cards for more resources.
Before I start creating a new talk, I ask myself 3 questions:
Ankle fractures are a common injury diagnosed in the Emergency Department. Being able to speak Ortho-ese (i.e. the language of orthopedists) is invaluable in consulting the orthopedist over the phone. One ankle fracture classification system that our orthopedists like to use is the Lauge-Hansen system.
Go to ALiEM (PV) Cards for more resources.
Occasionally, I get a rare – “Hey congrats on the article!” comment from residents or students. It’s usually in reference to my ACEP News column that comes out every 3 months on Tricks of the Trade. However, I got about 3 shout-outs in the past 2 days. How odd.
Then I saw one of our office staff who was reading EM News. “Hey cool!” she said. Totally confused, I realized that I was quoted on the front page of this week’s publication about iPhone applications in EM. Many months ago, I had done a brief telephone interview with the writer.
On any given day in the ED, I use my super-bright penlight 2-5 times a day. It is amazing what things I’ve almost missed without a bright LED flashlight.
I wanted to revisit a prior post about the importance of changing your Tungsten penlight to a LED light.
In this installment of the Paucis Verbis (In a Few Words) e-card series, the topic is Urinary Tract Infection. UTIs are one of the most common infections that we treat in the Emergency Department.
Adapted from [1]
Go to ALiEM (PV) Cards for more resources.