I recently took an extended vacation at the end of residency, and had some time to reflect upon nearly an decade of medical training. I write this as an letter to my younger, naive self, in hopes that trainees may learn from my experiences. Dear PGY-1 Shahbaz, I have some big news for you: things are going to change. Don’t bother memorizing the SIRS criteria, its going to be gone in a few years. …
Dr. Google isn’t the colleague you’d like it to be
“Well, I looked up my symptoms on Google, and it said I was having a heart attack”, we’ve all had this patient interaction before. We live in an era where information is so freely and easily accessible. The danger comes in determining the intrinsic accuracy of data. An recent study has suggested that researching symptoms online is more likely to make one feel worse, and less informed. While this is of no surprise to …
A lesson on blood and bullets for Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum is clearly in need of a biology lesson following his puzzling assertion that the youth who filled Washington’s streets in protest of America’s infamously lax gun laws would have better spent their time learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), in case a shooting were to occur in their high school. “How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to …
Syncope: what (if any) investigations are required?
Syncope is a common problem encountered in the Emergency Department, and yet despite this there are few strong consensus guidelines, and significant practice variation. Here we seek to explore some of the evidence regarding syncope care. The vast majority of literature and recommendations on syncope in this post, are based upon the well patient who has a syncopal event and is now well again. The differential diagnosis in this scenario is actually fairly …
Head Injury: minor, minimal or trivial. The difference matters!
The Canadian CT Head rule is a great rule. Really. Yet, time and time again we see it applied erroneously, or learners fail to appreciate the population for whom this decision rule was meant. Patients with head injury are often seriously over investigated, and this likely is secondary to a lack of appreciation regarding decision making. Here, we seek to dissect some of the nuances. The vast majority of literature examining the utilization …
Practicing emergency medicine in New Zealand: A Canadian’s perspective
Dr. Rob Woods is a well known Emergency Physician and program director for the FRCPC Emergency Medicine Program at the University of Saskatchewan, who recently practiced emergency medicine in New Zealand on a one-year sabbatical. Here, he provides us some with answers to many questions he has been getting, insights into the country, lifestyle and medicine from abroad. Why did you go to New Zealand? We also thought it would be great for …