Editor’s Note: Earlier this month at #CAEP15, we found out that one of the residents (Dr. Qamar Amin –@qam1n) at the University of Ottawa (who is the lead author of the CJEM featured paper this month) was going to be there. As we are very excited to see junior clinician researchers doing great work, so we reached out to the CJEM social media team to see if they could help us with a …
#CAEP15 Special Edition | Digital Scholarship Elective – An Educational Innovation by the BoringEM team
Editor’s note: This past week, whilst BoringEM.org was down, there was the ever eventful and fun #CAEP15 conference, which was held in beautiful Edmonton, AB. If you missed out, check out feeds by our editorial team (@TChanMD, @SLuckettG, @Brent_Thoma, @purdy_eve) for cool stuff that we saw. That said, one of the undisputed highlights of the conference was seeing one of our writers (Dr. Alia, Dharamsi, @alia_dh) present her novel Digital Scholars program during …
Boring Question | Do patients with liver disease need FFP before procedures?
I was recently asked to give fresh frozen plasma to a patient with liver disease and an elevated INR before a therapeutic thoracentesis. He was otherwise healthy and had no history of bleeding diathesis. While I was asking for consent and explaining the risks and benefits of blood product transfusion, I began to wonder about the true benefits in his case. Knowing that liver failure leads to both pro and anti-coagulant deficiencies, I wondered: Is an elevated …
Life Beyond Medicine | Humanities and Visual Arts
Do What You Love Obviously, med school is stressful. It’s especially stressful in third year, when students are starting to reflect on their extra-curricular involvements in the past two years for CaRMs applications and residency. For those who have managed to push out 5 publications, sit in student council, and still managed to go out on a Tuesday night and stumble into a physiology class at 830 on a Wed morning: kudos to them …
Life Beyond Medicine | Consulting for medical television
The “Life Beyond Medicine” section is supposed to bring a new perspective to our readers about what it means to be a doctor and still have a life outside of medicine. That said, one of the things that I have had a chance to do recently is work as a consultant on a TV show, and that would be something that I would likely not have been able to do were it NOT …
KT Evidence Bite: Cardioversion and Thromboembolism
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, …