Tactical Medicine News Blog

Dr. Dave MacKinnon & Dr. Mike Brzozowski return for an Update in Trauma Literature since the epic Episode 10: Trauma Pearls & Pitfalls. In this episode we discuss predicting the sick trauma patient, videolaryngoscopy vs traditional laryngoscopy, Damage Control Resuscitation, Occult Hemothorax, Blunt Thoracic Aorta and Cardiac Injury, Sternal Fractures, Tranexamic Acid, Communication in the trauma bay and much more...... The post Episode 39: Update in Trauma Literature appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

What’s the first thing that pops into your head when you see an older woman presenting to the ED from a nursing facility with atraumatic altered mental status? If you’re like me, ‘UTI’ comes quickly to mind. I then banish the thought of a UTI and force myself to go through a worst-first differential diagnosis to exclude, either through the history and clinical assessment or through testing, more dangerous causes. This is a case of a 67-year-old woman with an unusual cause of altered mental status… and a UTI.

It was a few months into my simulation fellowship and I had been devoting a lot of my time to teaching at the medical school. I loved it. I find few things as fun as teaching students who are super motivated to learn. That got me thinking about why learning isn’t always that way. What is it about certain settings that foster a student’s passion to learn while others, that may be presenting the exact same content, cause the same group of students to grumble and disengage?

The Case of the Terrible Teammate presented a conflict between a team of chief residents. Sarah got upset because David seemed to be shirking his responsibilities and getting her to do all of the work. While we provided a specific context for the case, interpersonal disagreements over the distribution of work may come up in any work arrangement that splits responsibility between two or more parties. When it does, how should we deal with it? This month Dr. Teresa Chan (@TChanMD) and I (@Brent_Thoma) explored this issue with insights from the ALiEM community and 3 experts.

Women with undifferentiated abdominal pain and/or vaginal bleeding commonly present to the emergency department.  Many textbooks advocate for the pelvic exam as an essential part of the history and physical exam. Performance of this portion of the exam is time consuming to the physician and uncomfortable for the patient. It is with great regularity that emergency medicine physicians make clinical decisions based on information derived from it, but is this information reliable and does it effect the clinical plan of patients?