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 …
Diagnostic Statistics for Medical Students
A few weeks ago I was tweeting about the excellent Statistics in Medicine MOOC offered by Kristin Sainani of Stanford University when Ernesto asked: @BoringEM how do you find this as a resident? Is statistics a gap in your training? #justcurious — Ernesto (@DilettanteMD) July 22, 2013 Well, is it? I was taught statistics in medical school and my residency program incorporated them into its curriculum. However, I feel like I always “got by” rather than really learned statistics. I …
D-Dimer: Should we adjust the cut-off value for age?
Recently this article flew across my twitter feed via a link from Cliff Reid: Diagnostic accuracy of conventional or age adjusted D-dimer cut-off values in older patients with suspected venous thromboembolism: systematic review and meta-analysis (open access BMJ June 2013). After a quick read of the abstract I was like this: A way to adjust the D-Dimer that preserves sensitivity while increasing specificity? That sounds MORE awesome than peach yogurt! Fewer negative CT’s would only be …
Educational Scholarship: Measuring the Impact of FOAM
I recently asked a prominent EM researcher “Does FOAM (Free Open Access Meducation) have academic value?” I don’t need to paraphrase his answer as it was quite concise: “No.” While he was elegant in his bluntness, you will probably not be surprised to hear that I disagree. This response led thinking and discussion that culminated at CAEP13 after I attended the Consensus Conference on Educational Scholarship. What is Educational Scholarship? The Consensus Conference was …
CAEP13 and Social Media
The Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP) will be holding its annual conference from June 1st-5th in Vancouver. As far as I know, CAEP13 will be the first Canadian emergency conference that has put effort into establishing a social media presence. CAEP_docs has promised some live-tweets and the #CAEP13 hash-tag has been set up with twubs.com. However, I think the success or failure of CAEP’s first venture into the world of social media will …