A large part of an emergency physician’s job is finding and ruling out emergencies. To do that we ask the patient questions, examine them, look at their blood, and take radiographic images. The goal of all of these tests is to rule-in or rule-out disease. However, not all tests are created equal… As a student, I became frustrated when I was told that such-and-such test was “good” and I should use it. What did good …
FOAM Quality: #FOAMed Conundrum or Community Challenge?
On Monday, April 27, 2015 we hosted a blog post about the @FOAMstarter project by Rob Bryant. Today, I would like to continue the discussion around #FOAMed with a post about quality. For all the newbies out there, I think it’s important for us to catch you up to the discussions we are having online about FOAM quality, and conveniently, it’s what I’m going to be guest speaking about today! Today (April 30, 2015), …
KT Evidence Bite: Colchicine for Pericarditis
Editor’s note: This is a series based on work done by three physicians (Patrick Archambault, Tim Chaplin, and our BoringEM Managing editor Teresa Chan) for the Canadian National Review Course (NRC). You can read a description of this course here. The NRC brings EM residents from across the Canada together in their final year for a crash course on everything emergency medicine. Since we are a specialty with heavy allegiance to the tenets of Evidence-Based Medicine, we thought we would serially release the biggest, …
KT Evidence Bite: Fibrinolysis in Intermediate PE
Editor’s note: This is a series based on work done by three physicians (Patrick Archambault, Tim Chaplin, and our BoringEM Managing editor Teresa Chan) for the Canadian National Review Course (NRC). You can read a description of this course here. The NRC brings EM residents from across the Canada together in their final year for a crash course on everything emergency medicine. Since we are a specialty with heavy allegiance to the tenets of Evidence-Based Medicine, we thought we would serially release the biggest, …
Keep Emergency for Emergencies? Reframing the basic assumption
Emergency departments (ED) are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Health conditions can develop or worsen at a moments’ notice, making the ED a necessary safety net for even the best healthcare systems. However, the very characteristic that makes the ED essential also leaves it open to abuse. When there is nowhere else to go it is an attractive location to bring the intoxicated, the homeless, the destitute – the …
KT Evidence Bite: Rapid blood pressure lowering in intracerebral hemorrhage
Editor’s note: This is a series based on work done by three physicians (Patrick Archambault, Tim Chaplin, and our BoringEM Managing editor Teresa Chan) for the Canadian National Review Course (NRC). You can read a description of this course here. The NRC brings EM residents from across the Canada together in their final year for a crash course on everything emergency medicine. Since we are a specialty with heavy allegiance to the tenets of Evidence-Based Medicine, we thought we would serially release the biggest, …