Do what you love, love what you do

In Mentorship by Brent Thoma18 Comments

Junior medical students get a lot of information from senior medical students. They have just gone through the system so it makes sense that these students would seek out their advice on everything from how to study to how to prepare for residency match. Generally, that advice is good. However, there is one statement that drives me crazy no matter what it is about. It goes something like this: You have to do THIS to get …

National Rounds | Diagnostic Reasoning: Should we trust our gut?

In Education & Quality Improvement, National Rounds by Jonathan Sherbino3 Comments

5On May 24th, 2016, Dr. Jonathan Sherbino (@sherbino) of McMaster University was invited to speak at Grand Rounds at the University of Saskatchewan on the topic of diagnostic reasoning. His presentation explained how physicians think of a diagnosis and how we can teach learners cognitive strategies to improve their diagnostic reasoning. This blog post has taken that wisdom and (hopefully) captured it in blog post form as the first blog edition of CanadiEM National Rounds. Misdiagnosis… The Boogieman …

CaRMS Application Preparation

In CaRMS Guide, Mentorship by Brent Thoma5 Comments

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 …

Counterpoint: Why Graduate Medical Education will be fine

In Counterpoint, Opinion by Teresa Chan5 Comments

Written by: Teresa Chan MD, FRCPC   |   Peer reviewed by: Brent Thoma MD, MA This piece is a Counterpoint piece in response to KevinMD piece:  J. Russell Strader, MD  Why graduate medical education is failing from December 19, 2013.  Read the original post here.   The Impetus for my latest Counterpoint In his piece on the KevinMD blog, Dr. J. Russell Strader implied that because he’s interviewing candidates whom he believes are …

View Post

The AnkiEM Project

In Knowledge Translation by Brent Thoma16 Comments

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 …

View Post

Handheld Ultrasound – A Review of the VScan

In Medical Concepts by Brent Thoma27 Comments

As it seems to be ultrasound month on BoringEM (see the guest posts from Paul Olszynski here: A Pictorial Approach to Ultrasound in Shock and Chris Byrne here: Point of Care Ultrasound: A Hyperechoic Future in Med Ed), I thought I’d chime in with a review of my new toy. I just completed a four week rotation at a regional ED that is not equipped with an ultrasound unit. Fortunately, my residency program purchased a GE VScan handheld ultrasound machine for …