It was an early morning shift at Janus General when I picked up the chart of a 36-year-old female with a two-week history of sore throat. I walked into the room and see a healthy looking 36 year old woman. Her vitals were stable, but she was febrile. She was reclining on a stretcher, breathing normally and did not appear to be in respiratory distress. She presented with a two-week history of sore throat with intermittent fever, no cough, no …
TipsforNewDocs: The HashTag
For most physician training programs in North America, July 1st is the universal promotion day that transitions students to residents, juniors to seniors, and seniors to fellows or attendings. This landmark event inevitably inspires the more experienced clinicians to wax philosophical about their experiences and pass on their pearls of wisdom to the next generation. In the past, these conversations have happened in cafeterias, locker rooms, doctor’s lounges, and classrooms. However, the increasing use of …
Chalk Talk #1: Acute Pain Control
BoringEM Chalk Talk’s are short (<5 minutes), basic videos aimed at contextualizing preclinical knowledge. They were initially created for the students of the Harvard Medical School Learner-Directed Simulation Program Chalk. I found that similar topics seemed to come up in a lot of the groups that I was teaching. Rather than doing the same basic tutorial for all of them, I decided to do it once and post it here for them to …
The Precordial Thump: Good, Bad or Ugly?
It’s one of those mythical interventions that everyone has heard of, less have attempted and few have seen used successfully. Everyone knows someone who knows someone that brought a patient back from the brink using only hope and the power contained within a tightly clenched fist. There’s something almost mystical about restarting a patient’s heart with a bare hand. However, these events are so rare that until Nadim Lalani’s tweet flew across my …
Stay or Pay: Saskatchewan physician retention
You show up for your job interview and things are going great. You really hit it off with the interviewers and could definitely see yourself working here. You know that after they give you some on-the-job training you will be qualified for your dream job. The training will be hard, occasionally requiring 24h shifts and >80h work weeks, but at least the pay is fair. You’re ecstatic. You give some firm handshakes and …
Advice for New Medical Bloggers
If you follow BoringEM you may have noticed that there has not been as much new content lately. While I plan to continue writing and occasionally hosting content from other Canadian writers, the frequency of my posts on this site will be decreasing to ~1 per month. After 70,000 hits in less than 9 months, I continue to be astounded by the support that BoringEM has received. More important than the randomness of internet …