Tactical Medicine News Blog

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is the number one cause of mortality in patients older than 65 years old. 1 To complicate this fact further, they also present atypically with weakness, nausea/vomiting, fatigue, and shortness of breath.  It has been shown that older adults who present to the emergency department (ED) with ACS and a chief complaint other than chest pain have worse outcomes:

A common thumb injury is the “gamekeeper’s thumb or “skier’s thumb”, which involves an injury to the ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) of the first MCP joint. It is caused by forced abduction and hyperextension of the thumb, such as from a ski pole. But did you know that there are two branches of the ligament that you should test?

Differentiating between SVT with aberrancy and VT can be very difficult. It is crucial to be able to make this distinction as therapeutic decisions are anchored to this differentiation. Brugada et al prospectively analyzed 384 patients with VT and 170 patients with SVT with aberrant conduction to see if it was possible to come up with a simple criteria to help differentiate between the two with high sensitivity and specificity.

New Horizons Do you like the ALiEM Book Club?  Well we like you too!…  so much so that we want YOU to join in on the next book discussion! We are taking the blog and book club to another level by pairing up with Dr. Teresa Chan (@TChanMD), an academic emergentologist from Canada. We are breaking the barriers of the internet and laying the foundation for a real-time, interactive discussion utilizing social media.

Dr. Rahul Patwari reviews the basics on how to determine an ECG’s rate, rhythm, and axis. It’s always nice to review these concepts. Do you remember how many seconds a traditional ECG typically spans on a single page? What’s the significance of the numbers: 300, 150, 100, 75, 60, 50? Spend a few minutes on these 2 refresher videos.