This is a topic for which the “how to” seems to be passed down from senior to junior medical students and never written down. I remember being pretty clueless about this process when I went through it. I was a relative late-comer to the Royal College EM sweepstakes, having decided to pursue that program only during the summer before fourth year. This was compounded by my inability to plan anything in advance, ever. I …
An Approach to Palliative Care in the ED
Palliative care is “the prevention and relief of suffering.” Given how much suffering that we see in the ED, emergency medicine physicians should have a working knowledge of some of the key skills in this specialty: managing pain and symptoms, delivering bad news, and helping families to make difficult decisions. These are three things that we do on a daily basis and could likely improve upon with increased focus.
CaRMS Personal Letters: You in 500 words or less
Originally posted on September 16, 2013. Staff Review added on October 1, 2014. More than any other component of the Canadian Residency Matching Service (CaRMS) process, personal letters seem to give medical students trouble. Most people find it hard to define themselves in general, let alone in a 500 word essay written for a critical audience with their career hanging in the balance. However, this reflective exercise is a right-of-passage for Canadian medical …
CaRMS CVs: Writing them Right
Originally published by Brent Thoma on August 31, 2013. Expert reviewed and re-published on September 23, 2014. How time flies. About 4 years ago at this time I was in Edmonton on an Emergency Medicine elective when the CaRMS website opened to applicants. The next few months were a blur of an empty word document in need of a personal letter, many frantic e-mails to my references (that I tried to make sound …
CaRMS Application Preparation
Originally posted on May 24, 2013. Staff Review added on September 16, 2014. It seems like match season only just finished. And yet, as the last of the Saskatchewan snow drifts left us, a new crop of medical student clerks (or, as we call them on the prairies, JURSIs) began preparing to sweat through the annual ritual they had been hearing stories about since their earliest premed days: CaRMS. Of course, with CaRMS …
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 …