Tactical Medicine News Blog

Welcome back to TLDR, where our motto is: “We read books so that you have time for Netflix.” Our premise is that most self-help, parenting, education, and life-coaching books are like chicken nuggets: 2% meat and 98% filler! This month’s book is more like cafeteria meatloaf. No matter! We’re still committed to extracting a few nutritious bits from all those ground-up gym mats. We picked through the fluff and pulled out 5 gems that are worth sharing. In his book “Talk Like TED,” Carmine Gallo promises that you too can present like a TED speaker. How do you do it? Read on.

If you mainly treat adults or both adults and children like me, then you have probably heard the (very annoying) quote, “kids are not just small adults”, and so I won’t say it again. Well, I guess I just did, but at least I wont stop at this quote, but attempt to explain how kids are not small adults, and how this may impact their care in the emergency department and the intensive care unit. Nearly all organ systems of young children are immature and developing throughout childhood and on into adulthood, including the cardiovascular system. Without a basic understanding of the key physiologic differences, the emergency and intensive care physicians will be ill equipped to care for the critical ill child. To understand how kids with shock present differently than adults, it’s important to discuss a few basic differences regarding intravascular volume and cardiovascular system in children especially neonates and infants (1-24 months of age). Also remember shock is defined the exact same way as it would be in adults even though the presentation and underlying physiology may differ. Shock is simply a state where tissue/organ blood flow is inadequate to meet tissue/organ metabolic demands.

After listening to feedback from educators, and specifically residency directors, who use the ALiEMU platform for asynchronous conference credit, we have decided to reconfigure our learning management system (LMS) platform to accommodate more fluid and diverse teams in flexible fashion. Residents and medical students within the same “class”? No problem. Pharmacy students doing peer-teaching around the world? No problem. Your program is not listed in our drop-down menu? We got rid of that requirement to form teams. The possibilities are endless.

Background: CCTA has become a popular modality in the ED setting to assess anatomic atherosclerotic disease in patients presenting with chest pain.  Advocates of CCTA feel that CCTA has a greater accuracy in identifying obstructive coronary artery disease and identification of high-risk disease compared to standard physiologic testing.  However, many published trials on CCTA were not adequately powered to evaluate patient oriented end points.  The aim of the current published study was to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis comparing CCTA with other standard of care (SOC) approaches in evaluation of patients with acute chest pain.

In anticipation of EM Cases Episode 116 on Opioid Misuse, Overdose and Withdrawal, Dr. Michelle Klaiman, Addictions and Emergency Medicine specialist, tells her Best Case Ever exemplifying how we can positively impact the lives of ED patients for years to come - even when they present with simple, run-of-the-mill diagnoses - by thinking outside the box and doing brief screening and interventions for patients with opioid use disorder. She discusses alternative pain control options as well as the use of suboxone to treat opioid withdrawal and opioid addiction.Best Case Ever exemplifying how we can positively impact the lives of ED patients for years to come, even when they present with simple, run-of-the-mill diagnoses, by thinking outside the box and doing brief screening and interventions for patients with opioid use disorder. The post BCE 76 Opioid Withdrawal appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.