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You are working one evening, and the EMS dispatch center calls. The ambulance is bringing in a 35-year-old male motor vehicle collision victim who is unresponsive and has a BP of 80 palpable. So, what happens next in your emergency department? Who do you assemble? What equipment do you gather? Do you call the blood bank and the operating room?
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Concussions, also known as mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI), create challenges for the emergency care provider.
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Victims of blunt trauma are frequently encountered in the emergency department (ED). Forty percent of all ED visits each year are attributed to injury, which equates to about 40 million ED visits annually. Additionally, approximately one-third of intensive care unit (ICU) admissions in the United States are trauma-related.
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Well, after my erudite presentation, the attending, who happened to be a cardiologist trained in the pre-interventional era, sat back and said, "Son, remember the heart is not a chronometer."
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Regardless of where we practice, increasingly we are confronted with patients who have been exposed to unusual diseases through travel. In a previous series of articles, we reviewed the diseases associated with travel, largely based on the geography. This article reviews infectious disease associated with travel by symptoms.
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A few years ago, cardiac stress testing would not have been an important subject for emergency physicians. With the growth of observation units run by emergency physicians, however, more of us are ordering these tests and then acting on the results.
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Many odors are noxious, but few are as repellent as the foul smell of massive hematochezia. Everybody in the emergency department knows something is wrong. Once you get past the smell, you realize you often have a very ill patient with a complex medical history and underlying comorbidities. Disposition decision is often easy ("ADMIT"), but to whom and where?
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Few sounds or smells in the emergency department (ED) get our attention as easily as vomiting. In response, we might reflexively order our "one-size-fits-all" standard antiemetic and begin by assuming that this is probably just another case of "gastroenteritis." There are, however, several antiemetics to choose from, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, as well as a myriad of diagnostic possibilities to consider.
