“List top 5 worrisome diagnoses for chest pain” – we’ve all asked this question to junior learners and medical students, and one answer that should always come up is aortic dissection (AD). As emergency physicians we are well versed in the entity, workup and management of AD, but as a fairly challenging diagnosis, I have often found it difficult to decide who needs to be worked up for dissection. During my training I …
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 …
Adult Epiglottitis: Not just a hot potato
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 …
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 …
Tiny Tips: The Effects of TCAs
This month I’ve been reading a lot of toxicology. While running through the Antidepressant chapter in Rosen’s I realized that I was definitely going to need help remembering the ridiculous number of pharmacological effects of TCAs. Practical? Not so much. A potentially esoteric exam question? Definitely. This is the first BoringEM “Tiny Tip.” While most of my medical posts are quite long, I think there is some merit to occasionally going over something …
The AnkiEM Project
Inspired jointly by Reuben Strayer‘s catalog of EMCards on Emergency Medicine Updates and Chris Nickson‘s post at Life in the Fast Lane on spaced repetition, I will be trialing a combination of these two ideas using Anki flashcard software to create the AnkiEM Project. Dr. Strayer‘s strategy for studying for his board exam was to summarize Rosen’s Emergency Medicine onto flash cards. In the spirit of FOAM, he then scanned all 1412 cards onto his EM Updates site and made them freely available. If you haven’t already checked them out …