Tactical Medicine News Blog

After seeing your fifth young patient of the day with chronic pelvic pain, constipation, and irritable bowel syndrome, it is easy to be lulled into the mindset that abdominal pain is nothing to worry about. Not so with the elderly. These 10 tips will help focus your approach to atraumatic abdominal pain in older adults and explain why presentations are frequently subtle and diagnoses challenging.

Across the medical profession, an essential skill is to be able to understand and interpret original research publications to guide your evidence-based practices. Dr. Rahul Patwari reviews the basics of statistics, specifically sensitivity and specificity, predictive values, probability, and the tradeoff between sensitivity and specificity.

Medical Education has taken social media by storm. Twitter, Facebook, the Blogosphere…  Medical Educators have used these often misused and misinterpreted forms of social interaction to share resources and educate. However, social media is quickly merging our private and public personae. As educators, we must be savvy and up-to-date regarding our learners’ social media usage, since the worlds can often collide. This week we present the case of Greg, a junior faculty member and attending emergency physician, who is experiencing a social media-mediated quandary.

A 9 year-old patient presents with a headache and fever after swimming, along with subjective neck stiffness. Meningitis was of concern especially because the serum WBC count was 25,000 and other inflammatory markers were elevated. Because the patient’s mother had an unpleasant experience with an epidural during childbirth, she adamantly opposed the idea of a lumbar puncture (LP). 

Over the past 4+ years, ALiEM has grown to be an exciting educational blog which focuses on the clinical, educational, and academic aspects of emergency medicine. It has far exceeded any of my expectations and has been an incredibly valuable and rewarding experience for me personally. Since its inception, the site has transitioned from a single-author site to a site with a superstar team of authors who cover a diverse range of clinical (e.g. cardiovascular, critical care, geriatric EM, pharmacology) and educational (book club, MEdiC series, educational pedagogies) content as well as an expert peer-review system. As now the blog’s Editor in Chief, I am constantly amazed that we have been successful on pretty much a small, self-funded budget. Going forward, I now realize that the blog’s continued growth and creative strategies are rate-limited by funding.