Welcome to another ultrasound-based clinical 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 the management or aided in diagnoses. In this month’s case, a 93-year-old female presents to the Emergency Department with crushing chest pain.
If you’re like me, you learned and then promptly forgot the Henderson Hasselbalch equation (HH eq) in medical school.1 After all, in clinical rotations it was never invoked, and our patients seemed to have fared well without it. So why bring up the topic now?
Medicine is changing. The ubiquitous nature of computing allows a level of sophistication exponentially greater than before. To a large extent we’re freed from much of the onerous work of rote memorization. In the ideal, that should free us to be more thoughtful about the way we approach our work and to have a deeper understanding of health and disease. Going forward, medicine will become increasingly computational. With that in mind, I’ll make three points about the HH eq.
Traditional teaching recommends naloxone doses of at least 0.4 mg IV to reverse opioid toxicity. Drs. Lewis Nelson (@LNelsonMD) and Mary Ann Howland (@Howland_Ann) co-authored the opioid antagonist chapter in Goldfrank’s Toxicologic Emergencies.1 They write:
“However, this dose [0.4 mg] in an opioid-dependent patient usually produces withdrawal, which should be avoided if possible. The goal is to produce a spontaneously and adequately ventilating patient without precipitating significant or abrupt opioid withdrawal. Therefore, 0.04 mg is a practical starting dose in most patients, increasing to 0.4 mg, 2 mg, and finally 10 mg.”
We are very excited this month to bring you another installment of the ALiEM-Annals of EM Global Journal Club. The highlighted article is Voison et al. on the “Ambulatory Management of Large Spontaneous Pneumothorax With Pigtail Catheters.” We hope you will participate in an online discussion based on the clinical vignette and questions below from now until Nov 17, 2014. Respond by commenting below or tweeting using the hashtag #ALiEMJC. In a few months, a summary of this journal club will be published in Annals of EM.
On Fri, Nov 14, 2014, we hosted a live Google Hangout with Dr. Stéphane Jouneau, the senior author of the Annals of EM publication who resides in France.
Welcome to the fourth ALiEM Approved Instructional Resources (AIR) Module! In an effort to reward our residents for the reading and learning they are already doing online, we have created an Individual Interactive Instruction (III) opportunity utilizing FOAM resources for U.S. Emergency Medicine residents. For each module, the AIR board curates and scores a list of blogs and podcasts. A quiz is available to complete after each module to obtain residency conference credit. Once completed, your name and institution will be logged into our private database, which participating residency program directors can access to provide proof of completion.
Ceftriaxone is a broad-spectrum antibiotic that is frequently administered intramuscularly (IM) in emergency medicine. However, these injections hurt — A LOT! Can we do anything to minimize the pain?
We’re all pretty familiar with the banana bag: intravenous (IV) fluids with the addition of thiamine, folic acid, multivitamins, and sometimes magnesium. Banana bags are commonly utilized in patients at risk for alcohol withdrawal symptoms or those who present to the emergency department (ED) acutely intoxicated.