Your triage nurse complains of numerous patients in the waiting room complaining of nausea, retching, and emesis. They ask you “why can’t we have an antiemetic on hand in triage?” Turns out they might have had an effective antiemetic on hand, or rather in their scrub pocket the entire time. They just didn’t know about it yet.
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Children with chest pain commonly present to the emergency department. Both the child and family members may think their symptoms are due to a serious illness. Among adolescents seen for their chest pain, more than 50% thought they were having a heart attack or that they had cancer.1 In reality, only 6% of pediatric chest pain has a cardiac etiology.2 Nonetheless, extensive and costly emergency department (ED) evaluations are common and there is wide practice variation.3
But prior to reassuring your patient, what can you do to reassure yourself that your patient doesn’t need a more extensive workup? What would make you suspicious for cardiac causes of pediatric chest pain?
Welcome to another ultrasound-based case, part of the “Ultrasound For The Win!” (#US4TW) Case Series. In this peer-reviewed case series, we focus on real clinical cases where bedside ultrasound changed management or aided in diagnoses. In this case, a 55-year-old man presents with acute-onset chest pain.
Unlike the previous cardiology modules, the environmental module was comparatively under-represented in the top 50 sites of the Social Media Index. Below we have listed our selection of the 4 highest quality blog posts within the past 12 months (as of October 2015) related to environmental emergencies, curated and approved for residency training by the AIR Series Board. More specifically in this module, we identified 2 AIRs and 2 Honorable Mentions.
Below we have listed our selection of the 6 highest quality blog posts related to 4 advanced level questions on trauma topics posed, curated, and approved for residency training by the AIR-Pro Series Board. The blogs relate to the following questions:
In this module, we have 6 AIR-Pro’s and we did not include any honorable mentions to prevent redundancy of the topics covered. To strive for comprehensiveness, we selected from a broad spectrum of blogs identified through FOAMSearch.net.
The newest round of the 2015 American Heart Association (AHA) Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Emergency Cardiac Care (ECC) contains 315 recommendations.1 It is easy to be overwhelmed by this massive (275 pages) document so this post will distill what you need to know in the emergency department. This update marks the end of a 5-year revision cycle for the AHA and the shift to a continuously updated model. Current and future guidelines can now be found at ECCGuidelines.heart.org. This round lacks any of the major foundational changes seen in 2010; however, we do say goodbye to some recommendations (bye bye vasopressin).
This year I published a Novel, Simple Method for Achieving Hemostasis of Fingertip Dermal Avulsion Injuries in the Journal of Emergency Medicine 1 — a technique I’ve used in my local ED for several years. In brief, this involves achieving hemostasis over a fingertip skin avulsion by using a tourniquet followed by tissue adhesive glue. After bringing the technique to press and sharing this video, I’ve received great tips from peers and subsequently refined it with some additional ideas. Thus I present for the first time on ALiEM: Dermal Avulsion Injuries 2.0.