Tactical Medicine News Blog

In this bonus episode, our second installment of the highlights from Whistler Update in Emergency Medicine Conference 2012, we have Dr. Eric Letovsky talking about complications of MI and the importance of listening for cardiac murmurs. Next, I moderate an expert panel on the current trends on imaging patients who present with renal colic and query appendicitis with Dr. Connie Leblanc, Dr. Joel Yaphe, Dr. David MacKinnon & Dr. Eric Letovsky. We then hear from Dr. Adam Cheng, Dr. Dennis Scolnick & Dr. Anna Jarvis in a pediatric expert panel about the newest on minor head injury, otitis media, mastoiditis and bronchiolitis. Dr. David Carr reviews one of the most important articles in 2011 regarding subarachnoid hemorrhage, and Dr. David MacKinnon gives us tonnes of clinical pearls when it comes to everyone's favourite subject, anorectal disorders. The post Episode 22a: Whistler Update in Emergency Medicine Conference 2012 appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

Sometimes on off-service morning table rounds, I like to close my tired eyes and focus my ears past the voice of the attending to hear the chorus of hundreds of pieces of paper flipping, shuffling, crinkling, and folding.  It’s one way to pass the time when surgeons debate over issues they don’t already know the answers to. Another is to get your phone out, and help answer the questions with them.

This is a guest post by Dr. Ian Brown (Stanford): The Roberts textbook describes the procedure of corneal fluorescein staining as touching a moistened fluorescein strip to the cornea.  Maybe it is an irrational fear of a paper cut to the sclera, or a fear of touching an already abraded cornea with the paper, but I try to find an alternative. I have seen physicians hold the eye open with one hand, hold the fluorescein with a second hand and then drip tetracaine on the paper and let it drip into the eye with a third hand. I, unfortunately, only have two hands.

A sister and brother, aged 7 and 14, respectively present with pharyngitis.  The 7F has sore throat, cough, fever, and post-tussive vomiting for 1 day.  She has posterior pharyngeal erythema, no lymphadenopathy, no exudate, no petechiae, and looks like a viral URI. The 14M had culture confirmed GAS pharyngitis 3 weeks ago, was treated with PCN-VK and symptoms resolved.  Now, he’s in the ED with signs and symptoms of pharyngitis again, including dysphagia, fever, cough, posterior pharyngeal erythema, swollen tonsils, LAD, and petechiae on his hard palate.

Last month, I announced Dr. Timothy Peck (Beth Israel Deaconess EM resident) as one of the winners of the Blog Incubator Contest. Starting today and for the next 2 Mondays, he'll be posting a 3-part series, which will eventually end up on his blog "Modern EM" at ModernEM.blogspot.com. His blog will feature examples of how [+] The post Introducing a new blog: "Modern EM" appeared first on ALiEM.