Tactical Medicine News Blog

The second annual Emergency Wellness Week is coming to a close. This week we featured wellness initiatives that you can use to boost wellness in your emergency department, talked about the importance of debriefing, talked to the White Coat Investor about financial wellness, and shared ways to improve wellness in just 30 minutes! Through the collaboration of ALiEM, The Wellness Think Tank, ACEP, CAEP, HippoEM, and CanadiEM- we hope that you have learned some techniques to improve your own wellness and that you will carry some of the techniques with you through the rest of the year!

Members of the 2016-17 ALiEM Chief Resident Incubator recently submitted proposals for the highly coveted 2017 EBSCO Health/DynaMed Plus Wellness Grant to improve residency wellness in emergency medicine. We are excited to announce the winners of the $1000 and $500 grant!

“One of the residents that I was working with was yelled at once by somebody else because he had cried while giving a family bad news. I think everyone knows when you’re giving them bad news; it’s not like a big secret. You maintaining a great deal of composure doesn’t change that fact. I think that we’re allowed to be human. If we force ourselves not to be human or have any degree of human emotion, that’s obviously not putting us on the path to wellness and certainly if we force other people not to be human that’s not putting either them or us on the path to wellness.” —Ilene A. Claudius, MD Breaking bad news to patients and families is a fact of life for an emergency physician. More than 300,000 patients die in emergency departments each year from either traumatic or nontraumatic cardiopulmonary arrest, and an even greater number are diagnosed with a new life-threatening or life-altering illness, such as cancer, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.1 We stand at the front lines for these patients and families when they are first confronted with death or their own mortality. It is up to us at these moments, not their specialists or family physicians, to comfort and support them in a time of need. While intensely fulfilling at times, this type of demanding emotional support can also be incredibly draining in an environment that never sleeps and never stops moving.

There are a whole slew of very important occult knee injuries - those that have a normal or near normal x-ray – that can cause serious morbidity if you miss them, and for the catchall soft tissue injuries there are some subtleties in diagnosis and management that will make a real difference to our patients. Arun Sayal and Hossein Mehdian answer questions such as: When should we suspect a spontaneously reduced knee dislocation? Do all patients suspected of a spontaneous knee dislocation require a CT angiogram to rule out vascular injury? Which patients with a low energy mechanism are at risk for knee dislocation and vascular complications? How can you increase the accuracy of the active straight leg raise in assessing for quadriceps and patella tendon rupture? What is an easy way to identify patella baja and patella alta on a knee x-ray? What are the indications for ultrasound of the knee? What are the true indications for a knee immobilizer and how can knee immobilizers kill our patients? and many more... The post Episode 91 Occult Knee Injuries Pearls and Pitfalls appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

There are a whole slew of very important occult knee injuries - those that have a normal or near normal x-ray – that can cause serious morbidity if you miss them, and for the catchall soft tissue injuries there are some subtleties in diagnosis and management that will make a real difference to our patients. Arun Sayal and Hossein Mehdian answer questions such as: When should we suspect a spontaneously reduced knee dislocation? Do all patients suspected of a spontaneous knee dislocation require a CT angiogram to rule out vascular injury? Which patients with a low energy mechanism are at risk for knee dislocation and vascular complications? How can you increase the accuracy of the active straight leg raise in assessing for quadriceps and patella tendon rupture? What is an easy way to identify patella baja and patella alta on a knee x-ray? What are the indications for ultrasound of the knee? What are the true indications for a knee immobilizer and how can knee immobilizers kill our patients? and many more... The post Episode 91 Occult Knee Injuries Pearls and Pitfalls appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.