Tactical Medicine News Blog

We had the remarkable pleasure of facilitating a MEdIC workshop at the Social Media and Critical Care (SMACC) conference in Chicago this past month. We shared our process with those who participated and spent time developing cases. We’d like to thank the participants from our workshop for their hard work!  The below is one of the final products that our amazingly engaged and enthusiastic group come up with. The case generated meaningful discussion in our SMACC live session, and we hope that it will be as engaging in the online forum! We look forward to hearing what you think about our Case of the Unseasoned Senior.

As the world of Free Open Access Medical Education has expanded over the last 5 years, one area that has been a laggard is the traditional journal. Although some journals release a limited number of articles in an open access format (NEJM, Annals of EM, Academic EM, EM Australasia, etc.) we haven’t seen a true open-access journal that is free to publish and free to read. This changed on June 24th, 2015 when the first issue of Critical Care Horizons was released.

We are excited to announce our new podcast series, 60-Second Soapbox! Each episode, one lucky individual gets exactly 1 whole minute to present their rant-of-choice to the world. Any topic is on the table – clinical, academic, economic, or whatever else may interest an EM-centric audience. Don’t worry if your are microphone-shy. We will carefully remix your audio to add an extra splash of drama and excitement. Even more exciting, participants get to challenge 3 of their peers to stand on a soapbox of their own!

We found an enormous amount of respiratory content and thus have divided the respiratory module into two modules. While the first module focused on general respiratory issues, this second module is focused on airway and pulmonary embolism. Below we have listed our selection of the 15 highest quality blog posts within the past 12 months (current as of March 2015) related to respiratory, curated and approved for residency training by the AIR Series Board. In this module we have 4 AIRs and 11 Honorable Mentions. We strive for comprehensiveness by selecting from a broad spectrum of blogs from the top 50 listing per the Social Media Index.

FEVER shows up beside the name of a new 3 year old that has just been checked into your department. This can be accompanied by many feelings when you see it from “Why are they here ?” to “I hope the child is not dying.” This is a reasonable range of thoughts depending on your level of experience and resources. Many variables are important with this “chief complaint” from how the temperature was actually obtained, to immunization status of the child, to how does the child look, and many more. In my estimation, fever gets a bad rap from general society. It’s our job to set the tone and fight “fever-phobia” when needed. Let’s examine some aspects of pediatric fever to change your mindset from apprehension, to “I’ve got this”.