It’s another Friday morning on the ward, and you are looking forward to discharging one of your patients home to spend time in their garden over the weekend. Ms. Jones is an 83-year-old lady admitted a few days ago with what turned out to be a urinary tract infection. Initially weak and slightly confused, after some IV fluids and oral antibiotics, she has been back to her peppy self over the past day. …
Tiny Tips: The COWS Scale
As the opiate crisis continues to escalate, emergency departments are seeing higher numbers of patients with complaints and complications related to opiate use disorder. There is strong evidence for opiate agonist treatment in preventing opiate related deaths. Additionally, Suboxone (buprenorphine-naloxone) is the recommended first line treatment.1 Suboxone Treatment For a full Suboxone start, a patient is required to be in moderate withdrawal, meaning a Clinical Opiate Withdrawal Scale (COWS) score of greater than …
Introducing the CanadiEM Junior Learner Primer App
We’ve developed the CanadiEM Junior Learner Primer App to help support junior medical learners during their emergency medicine rotations. In the fast-paced environment of emergency medicine, learners can often find themselves overwhelmed when faced with the acuity as well as the wide variety of cases. Communication and time management skills requirements can also be very different when compared to other specialities. To help make emergency rotations easier and more meaningful, we have created …
Journal Club by CanadiEM E05: The ARREST trial and ECMO programs
Join us and our expert guest Dr. James Gould as we discuss ECMO and mature ECMO programs, appraise the ARREST trial and consider the future of cardiac arrest care. Today’s hosts are Jayneel Limbachia, Dakoda Herman, and Jake Domm. Expert Guest: Dr. James Gould is a father of 3, emergency medicine physician and assistant professor at QEII Health Sciences Center and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a special interest in resuscitation …
Miracles from Heaven Case Report: Small Bowel Obstruction
Earlier in the day, five-year-old Annabel had a regular morning and afternoon. She attended a birthday party and seemed to be herself, laughing with her friends and running around. At 0200 and Annabel calls for her mom, crying and clutching her stomach. Her mom rushes into her daughter’s room and finds Annabel in significant pain. Annabel is rushed to the hospital at 0400. At triage, she is in significant discomfort, crying, and tachycardic. …
Doctors Can’t Remember Everything: Calciphylaxis and a Diagnostic Aid
The general approach to the differential diagnosis has remained unchanged since the dawn of modern medicine. A doctor sees a patient, gets some initial information, and then creates a list of what they think are the most likely and dangerous possibilities. This list of possibilities is created by comparing the present patient to others that the doctor has seen and/or querying his/her memory for disease patterns that they have read in textbooks. This …