Emergency Medicine General
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Hypothermia and Frostbite
Hypothermia is a medical emergency that requires immediate attention and correction. For patients with environmental exposures, especially freezing ambient temperatures, cold water, snow, and ice, frostbite injuries are of significant concern.
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Falls in Older Adults
Falls cause significant morbidity and mortality among older adult patients compared to younger patients. When treating a patient who has fallen, the emergency medicine physician should identify traumatic injuries and evaluate for medical pathology contributing to the fall, as well as manage the patient.
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Scarlet Fever and Invasive Streptococcal Disease
While most physicians are familiar with the common presentations of streptococcal infections (e.g., pharyngitis, impetigo), it is important to recognize the carrier state, learn management of common complications (e.g., peritonsillar abscess), and identify the potentially serious, and perhaps deadly, complications and invasive infections.
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Envenomations Update
This article will give an overview of medically important non-marine envenomations in the United States, including their clinical manifestations, treatment, and disposition.
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An Alternative Model for ECPR: Keeping the Pool of Physicians Skilled in the Procedure Small
Extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or ECPR, is relatively new to UF Health’s Shands Hospital in Gainesville, FL. Interestingly, unlike the model for ECPR being deployed by hospitals in San Diego, where dozens of emergency physicians are being trained in the technique, developers of the ECPR program at UF Health have decided that it is important to restrict the number of emergency physicians who perform ECPR.
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Ketamine: Old Drug, New Uses
Ketamine is a dissociative medication, the only one in its class. Most commonly used as a general anesthetic, it permits patients to tolerate acutely uncomfortable procedures while maintaining most brainstem function, such as breathing and perfusion.
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Diagnosis and Management of Acute Heart Failure in the Emergency Department
This article will focus on the care of patients with acute heart failure in the emergency department, reviewing new onset and decompensation of chronic heart failure, discussing heart failure classification based on clinical presentation, and providing updated recommendations on management and disposition from the emergency department.
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Novel Psychoactive Substances of Abuse: Part II
This is the second of a two-part series. Part I reviewed stimulants and started the discussion of hallucinogens and psychedelics. Part II will finish the discussion of hallucinogens and conclude with novel sedative drugs.
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Novel Psychoactive Substances of Abuse: Part I
This issue is the first of a two-part series on new novel or designer psychoactive drugs. Many of them represent alterations of existing agents that exhibit new effects from the modification. Keep the possibility of intoxication with these agents in mind when evaluating patients with altered levels of consciousness and mentation.
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Pain Control in Older Adults
Many older adults experience pain, but there are limited guidelines to appropriately manage their pain. Additionally, assessment of pain control in older adult patients can be difficult because of impairments in cognition, hearing, and sight. Increasingly, acute care providers are challenged to manage pain in this unique population. This article will discuss the epidemiology and etiology of pain in the older adult population, the pathophysiology, tools for diagnosing pain in older adults with cognitive impairment, and appropriate multimodal pain management for older adult patients.