ALiEM-Annals of EM Journal Club: Targeted Temperature Management

We are very excited this month to bring you our third Global Journal Club. We hope you will participate in an online discussion based on the clinical vignette and questions below from now until March 27th. Respond by commenting below or tweeting (#ALiEMJC).

On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 at 1630 EST, we will be hosting a 30-minute live Google Hangout with Dr. Niklas Nielsen, the lead author of the Targeted Temperature Management (TTM) study, that is informed by the discussion. Later this year a summary of this journal club will be published in Annals of Emergency Medicine.

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By Brent Thoma, MD MA|2026-06-16T16:05:12-07:00Mar 20, 2014|Critical Care/ Resus, Journal Club|

Trick of the Trade: Nasopharyngeal Oxygenation

A 76-year-old obese male with a history of severe COPD presents to your emergency department (ED) in acute respiratory distress. The patient’s large beard prevents an adequate seal with the NIV (non-invasive ventilation) mask, and the patient continues to desaturate. You are fairly sure that this patient will be a difficult airway and optimizing oxygenation prior to and during your intubation attempt would be ideal. Now what?

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By Bradley Ching, MD|2016-11-11T19:19:38-08:00Mar 17, 2014|Critical Care/ Resus, Tricks of the Trade|

Approach to Difficult Vascular Access

Intravenous (IV) access is a basic and invaluable skill for emergency physicians. For patients requiring rapid fluid resuscitation, airway management, or medication administration, the placement of one or more IV lines is absolutely essential. Most patients do well with a simple, landmark-based, blind placement of a superficial peripheral IV. However, we often encounter situations where this may be difficult or impossible to achieve, and so we all should have a repertoire of other sites and techniques to employ.

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By Terrance Lee, MD|2026-06-16T16:04:43-07:00Jan 15, 2014|Cardiovascular, Critical Care/ Resus, Expert Peer Reviewed (Clinical)|

Applying to EM-Critical Care Medicine Fellowships: What you need to know

Emergency physicians (EPs) have been successfully training in and practicing critical care in the ICU for decades, though until recently board certification remained closed to EPs. In the last few years, however, we have seen monumental changes in training opportunities for EPs, including national standardization of training programs, and most importantly, the establishment of three distinct pathways to board certification. Though the details of some of these pathways are still being worked out, much more concrete arrangements have been reached in the last 6 months. If you are an EM resident interested in applying to critical care fellowships, this is what you need to know.

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By Julian Villar, MD MPH|2026-06-16T16:04:41-07:00Jan 14, 2014|Critical Care/ Resus, Medical Education|

Mechanical CPR and the LINC trial

The first time I saw the Thumper performing CPR on a patient I thought “well, that makes sense.” Since then we have seen other devices, most notably the Zoll AutoPulse and the Physio-Control LUCAS. It was disappointing to many in 2005 when the AutoPulse trial was halted early due to harm. ¹ Although four-hour survival was similar between groups, the hospital discharge survival rate in the manual CPR group was 9.9% compared to 5.8% in the mechanical CPR group. Many hypotheses were proposed to explain the results, which included Hawthorne effect, prolonged device deployment time, and enrollment bias. Last month, the results of the LUCAS in Cardiac Arrest (LINC) trial were published in JAMA, breathing new life into the mechanical vs manual CPR debate. ²

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By Sean Kivlehan, MD MPH|2016-11-11T19:17:51-08:00Dec 10, 2013|Critical Care/ Resus, EMS, Expert Peer Reviewed (Clinical)|

Prehospital: Does QUICKER hypothermia equal BETTER hypothermia?

The short answer to this question is NO. Since the landmark post-arrest, therapeutic hypothermia studies published in 2002, ^1,2 extensive efforts have been made to ensure our post-arrest patients are cooled… and cooled fast. It only seemed logical to extend this revolutionary treatment into the field and have paramedics begin the cooling in the field. New EMS protocols were developed around the country to incorporate hypothermia into cardiac arrest management and well received by paramedics and EMTs. But a recent JAMA publication calls this now into question. ³

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By Sean Kivlehan, MD MPH|2016-12-23T19:38:30-08:00Dec 5, 2013|Critical Care/ Resus, EMS|

Subsegmental Pulmonary Embolisms (SSPE) are Important

Multi-detector computed tomographic pulmonary angiography (CTPA) allows for better visualization of peripheral pulmonary arteries allowing for diagnosis of small peripheral emboli limited to the subsegmental pulmonary arteries. Interestingly as these SSPE’s get diagnosed more and more, two questions come to mind: