Tactical Medicine News Blog

After much recent feedback on the poll about the Paucis Verbis cards (thanks to all who responded!), I see trends: Several have commented that it is getting increasingly difficult to find a card that they are searching for. There are over 100 cards now! So, I managed to figure out how to embed a Google Doc spreadsheet into the blog, which now allows you to sort and search for particular cards (minor HTML coding necessary). This list will permanently live on the Paucis Verbis page.

This is part 2 of my review of Dr. Rosen’s 1979 article on “The Biology of Emergency Medicine” (see part 1). According to Dr. Rosen, there are 3 broad categories of ED patients: The emergent The urgent The non-urgent We must know how to identify and prioritize these. Medical students and residents are poorly taught the differences.

Feedback is essential for continued growth and improvement in any longitudinal project that you work on. Thus annually, I conduct a poll to see if I can improve anything on the blog. This year, I wanted to focus on the Paucis Verbis pocket cards. There are over 100 cards now, which are each based on recent peer-reviewed publications. I try to make them as practical as possible with the goal of improving evidence-based practice at the bedside.

This post is based on one of the most interesting articles I have ever read in EM. The article written by Dr. Peter Rosen in 1979 and published in The Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians (later become Annals of Emergency Medicine) is a landmark piece. It defines the specialty with so much precision that even contemporary authors find very little discrepancy of what Dr. Rosen wrote and the state of EM in present time.

Continuing the theme of mandibular dislocation tricks (protecting your thumbs, post-reduction stabilization), Dr. Daniel Gromis from Advocate Christ Medical Center describes a novel reduction technique, based on the Cunningham shoulder reduction technique using muscle relaxation.