The seeds of the Suicide Plant, when ingested, may result in significant toxicity, including the ECG findings shown. Which kind of toxicity does it cause?
For the third consecutive year, we provide a quick summary of some important Emergency Medicine pharmacotherapy articles from the last 12 months. We have tried to focus on articles you may have missed, but are potentially high-impact for improving clinical practice in the ED. Without further ado, we present the 8 must-know EM pharmacotherapy articles of 2016.
Medical providers commonly encounter patients in the emergency department who state they are anticoagulated with warfarin, but they have no idea what dose they are taking. “I know that I take two pills of warfarin daily.” Dosing becomes critically important especially when continuing their medication as an inpatient, refilling their medications, or adjusting their outpatient dose because of an inappropriately high or low INR level. How can you determine the patient’s warfarin dose?
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Welcome to the Toxicology (Part 2) AIR-Pro Module. Below we have listed our selection of the 12 highest quality blog posts related to 5 advanced level questions on toxicology 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 8 AIR-Pro’s and 4 Honorable Mentions. To strive for comprehensiveness, we selected from a broad spectrum of blogs identified through FOAMSearch.net and FOAMSearcher.
We love magnesium in the Emergency Department. It’s been said that magnesium is second-line for everything (kind of like doxycycline). But what about rate/rhythm control in atrial fibrillation (AF)? The 2014 AHA/ACC/HRS guideline for the management of patients with AF doesn’t mention magnesium at all.1 Dr. Josh Farkas (@PulmCrit) wrote about magnesium infusions for atrial fibrillation and torsade last year. His post looked at its use for cardioversion, rhythm-control, and rate-control in critically-ill patients. Our post will focus specifically on the IV magnesium data for rate-control in ED-related settings.
The Toxicologist Mindset series features real-life cases from the San Francisco Division of the California Poison Control System.
Case: A 39-year-old man, with no significant past medical history, was brought to the emergency department by family members, over three consecutive days, for anxiety, confusion, and ataxia. In the first two visits, his laboratory work-up, including complete blood cell count, chemistry panel, liver function tests, urine drug screen, and non-contrast head CT, were unremarkable. On his third visit, he was profoundly encephalopathic with confusion and poor concentration. He had bilateral lower extremity weakness and ataxia. He was admitted to the neurology service for further work up. Additional history revealed that hundreds of empty canisters of whipped cream chargers were found in his house.
We are proud to present Capsules Module 8: Venous Thromboembolism, now published on