Tactical Medicine News Blog

Welcome to another ultrasound-based case, part of the “Ultrasound For The Win!” (#US4TW) Case Series. In this case series, we focus on a real clinical case where point-of-care ultrasound changed the management of a patient’s care or aided in the diagnosis. In this case, a 57-year-old woman presents with chest pain and dyspnea.

Choosing Your Initial Settings: I hope you now see what physiologies to consider when setting up the ventilator and your goals for each. If your patient doesn’t fit into one of these three categories, then I set up my ventilator as if I was managing a patient who has refractory hypoxemia to maintain a lung protective strategy even if they don’t think they have very significant lung disease. Maintaining a lung protective strategy with low tidal volume ventilation has been shown to decrease ventilator induced lung injury and minimize harm, even in patients without refractory hypoxemia and ARDS (1-2).

The use of heated and humidified high flow nasal cannula has become increasing popular in the treatment of patients with acute respiratory failure through all age groups.  In part 1 we summarized how High Flow Nasal Cannula (HFNC) works.  In part 2, we will discuss the main indications for its use in adult and pediatric patients.

The SplintER series is back with a new sub-series – Leg Day! We will review lower extremity orthopedic injuries, introduce advanced concepts, and highlight ways to implement these into your next shift. In this post, we summarize the appropriate way to evaluate, diagnose, and manage tibial plateau fractures. This post is peer-reviewed by Dr. Kori Hudson, one of our expert sports medicine colleagues! Please read below for her commentary.

Bookstore shelves and Amazon lists are filled with self-help titles that promise to make you a better manager, a better parent, or a better fishmonger. But most of them suffer from the same weakness: 2 pages of good practical advice is padded with 298 pages of filler. Our new column TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) is a solution to what we call the McNugget Problem: trying to find the 5 bullet points of meaty goodness suspended within a mass of stale anecdotes, overcooked platitudes, and bad food analogies. Our TLDR goal is to find the critical take-aways in each book we review, and present them to you in a concise, easy-to-apply format. We read the books so you don’t have to!