Pediatric Emergency Medicine can be intimidating for even some of the most seasoned providers, but Drs. Liz Fierro and Natasha Li (both PEM Fellows at Loma Linda University Health) have you covered! Their interactive infographic, Pocket PEM, reminds readers of some core PEM content, including pediatric fever, bronchiolitis, and the crashing neonate.
Regional nerve blocks of the face and ear can be a wonderful choice of analgesia in a child, particularly for wounds that need to be repaired. The benefits include fewer local injections, improved cosmesis due to less wound margin distortion, and improved analgesia within the nerve region.1,2 The following blog post and brief video tutorial review the key elements of this technique.
The standard for diagnosing pneumonia is a combination of the clinical history, physical examination, and chest x-ray (CXR) findings. However, lung ultrasound (US) has been shown to be a reasonable alternative to CXR in children, and may be an appropriate alternative diagnostic imaging modality in the Emergency Department (ED).
A 3 year-old boy presents with a deep laceration of the distal phalanx, through the nail bed, after slamming his fingers in a car door. He is crying, anxious, and uncooperative. How do you make this situation easier to evaluate and repair?
Nail bed and finger laceration repairs can be challenging, and even more challenging in young patients. Preparation is key to getting a good outcome. Here we present a pediatric trick of the trade on immobilizing a finger for digit or nail bed procedures.
Congratulations, you’ve made it! On July 1, thousands of medical students across the country made the transition to becoming Emergency Medicine residents. It was a particularly competitive year for Emergency Medicine, with 99.7% of first-year spots filled despite a whopping 2,047 positions being offered in 2017 (up by 152 spots compared to last year).1 Now begins the most crucial 3 or 4 years of your medical training that will prepare you for the rest of your career in Emergency Medicine.
Insulin does MANY things in the body, but the role we care about in the Emergency Department is glucose regulation. Insulin allows cells to take up glucose from the blood stream, inhibits liver glucose production, increases glycogen storage, and increases lipid production. When insulin is not present, such as in patients with Type 1 diabetes mellitus (DM), all of the opposite effects occur.
The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) collaborative has teamed up with the ALiEM and CanadiEM teams to introduce the official PECARN visual decision rule aid for pediatric blunt head trauma! This has been a 6 month collaboration focused on bringing evidence-based research to the bedside in pediatric emergency medicine (EM).