Tactical Medicine News Blog

We are incredibly excited to announce the development of our newest project — ALiEMU. This top-secret project has been in the works for only 3 months, but has gained incredible momentum thanks to our all-star team, led by Dr. Chris Gaafary, who is our ALiEMU Chief of Design and Development… while he is not busy being an incoming EM chief resident at the University of Tennessee. What is ALiEMU? The one-liner is: A free educational website which hosts free, on-demand e-courses, featuring the AIR series as the inaugural course.

Currently, guidelines recommend therapeutic hypothermia for comatose adults with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA). A recent trial of adults with OHCA showed that therapeutic hypothermia with the use of a targeted temperature of 33°C vs maintained therapeutic normothermia of 36°C, did not improve outcomes. There is a paucity of randomized trials of therapeutic hypothermia in children with OHCA, but sometimes adult trials get extrapolated to pediatrics. There are differences between adult and pediatric populations with OHCA, which makes it difficult to extrapolate the results of the adult trials to a pediatric population.

Author’s Note: This post is one of the first written for a new site sponsored by the NYU/Bellevue Emergency Department called Core EM. This is a FOAM site dedicated to core content Emergency Medicine featuring a blog, podcast and procedure video section. The Core EM Project launches on June 15th, 2015. Thanks to Salim and the REBEL EM editorial staff for posting this here. We’ll make sure to let you all know when Core EM is up and running at www.coreem.net Definition: Tissue hypoperfusion that is primarily attributable to damage to the heart. Criteria: The cardiology literature focuses diagnostic criteria based on systolic blood pressure (SBP) (Gowda 2008) SBP < 90 mm Hg Decrease in MAP by 30 mm Hg It is more important, however, to look for evidence of hypoperfusion. In the acute setting, this will typically manifest as a change in mental status (lethargy, decreased responsiveness, agitation, decreased cap refill, cool extremeties etc.).

Dr. Jeremy Faust is a EM resident of many talents. His accomplishment are wide and varied from his many musical awards, to his work with grammy award winning vocal group Roomful of Teeth, to his column in ACEPnews, to his appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show speaking on the Ebola crisis, to his upcoming SMACC Chicago talk. He’s well known in the FOAM world and, for the last year, has been producing quality FOAM core content with Lauren Westafer on their podcast: FOAMCast. Dr. Jeremy Faust, following his own mantra, broke the mold, submitting his How I Work Smarter column despite not being officially nominated. Bold. Follow the link, yall, to discover Dr. Faust’s keys to success.

To launch Season 2 of our EM Match Advice Series, Dr. Michael Gisondi has recruited another all-star cast of residency program leaders around the United States to share their sage wisdom about the Visiting Student Application Service (VSAS). This centralized process to coordinate visiting clerkship rotations first began in 2008 and now almost all medical schools participate. Because anecdotally the VSAS application process has been challenging, we gathered some experts to share their insights in a Google Hangout.