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 …
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 …
#EMConf: Sharing EM residency teaching with the world
Those of you that are on twitter may have noticed a flurry of tweets with the hashtag #EMConf. This initiative (that is best outlined by Nikita Joshi of ALiEM here) has the noble goal of sharing pearls from the academic sessions (variably called “Conference” “Academic half-day” “Didactics” etc depending on the state/country/continent) of EM residency programs with the world. If you’ve been tuning in you may have had the opportunity to catch tweets …
Tech Corner: Podcasts in Emergency Medicine
I’m Maxim Ben-Yakov (aka @DocMaximum) – PGY4 in the FRCP (EM) program at University of Toronto, and current 1st year Fellow in Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Sick Kids. Often folks ask me: “what’s that awesome lecture or podcast you were talking about?” or “What do you think of this app?” Well this is the place where we are going to bring it all together. We’ll talk podcasts, apps, blogs, and anything having to do …
Tiny Tips: PERC Rule
The “Tiny Tips” series aims to provide helpful memory aids for remembering difficult to recall exam material for emergency medicine. You can get all of them compiled in an easy-to-review way by downloading the Tiny Tips deck of Boring Cards. This post outlines a mnemonic to help remember the PERC rule (Pulmonary Embolism Rule-out Criteria). PERC is a useful clinical decision rule to help rule-out pulmonary embolism in patients a clinician’s gestalt suggests …
The Social Media Index (SM-Index): A Pilot Project
As promised last week, I have put together a pilot Social Media Index (SM-Index) for free open-access medical education (FOAM) websites. There were 25 sites included within this analysis. They were selected from the sites that I frequent as well as anyone that volunteered their site when I asked on twitter. This article discusses the thinking behind the creation of the SM-Index and the methods used to calculate it. The index itself is …