Tactical Medicine News Blog

Welcome to the December 2015 REBELCast, where Swami, Matt, and I are going to tackle a couple of topics in the world of Cardiology and Critical Care. First of all, we all know that the optimal treatment for STEMI is getting the patient to the cardiac catheterization lab, and time is muscle, but does it help to get patients to the catheterization lab even faster than 90 minutes? Or does speeding up the time have bad outcomes? Secondly, it has been drilled into our heads that high-quality CPR with minimal to no interruptions is key in OHCA.  This gives our patients the best chance of neurologically intact survival.  But a new study just published might beg to differ. So with that introduction today we are going to specifically tackle: Topic #1: Reducing Door to Balloon (D2B) Times to <90 Minutes in STEMI Topic #2: Continuous vs Interrupted CPR in OHCA

Welcome to another ultrasound-based 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 management or aided in diagnoses. In this case, a 55-year-old man presents with acute-onset chest pain.

Background: Acute, non-traumatic low back pain (LBP) is a common chief complaint and has been estimated to lead to more than 2.7 million ED visits annually nationwide. It affects a broad range of individuals and can be painful and debilitating long after an initial ED visit. Often times in clinical practice, evidence based decisions on medical management of acute lower back pain seem to be thrown out the window; rather medications are prescribed on a gestalt medicament do jour. NSAIDs, muscle relaxants, and opioids have all been used in isolation and in combination for treating acute LBP but trials investigating the efficacy of these medications combined have produced heterogeneous results.

Unlike the previous cardiology modules, the environmental module was comparatively under-represented in the top 50 sites of the Social Media Index. Below we have listed our selection of the 4 highest quality blog posts within the past 12 months (as of October 2015) related to environmental emergencies, curated and approved for residency training by the AIR Series Board. More specifically in this module, we identified 2 AIRs and 2 Honorable Mentions.

Welcome to season 3, episode 3 of the ALiEM Medical Education in Cases (MEdIC) series! Our team (Brent Thoma, Sarah Luckett-Gatopoulos, Tamara McColl, Eve Purdy, and Teresa Chan) is pleased to welcome you to our online community of practice where we discuss difficult medical education cases each month. As usual, the community discussion will be reviewed using qualitative research methods to produce a curated summary that will be combined with two expert responses to create a functional teaching resource. This month’s case features a problem that educators face when interacting with off-service residents. What is the role of an attending on one service when dealing with residents providing care from another discipline? Does it take a whole village to raise a resident? Please read the case and join in the discussion below!