Emergency departments in the United States are frequently confronted with trauma patients with varying degrees of injury.
As a group, I find most emergency physicians skeptical of many of the "advanced" technologies used to treat chronic diseases. I attribute this to our biased experience with these patients; those who do well are not likely to come to the ED very often.
The ED is a common setting for the initial evaluation of emotional and behavioral disorders, including suicidal behavior or attempts. In the United States, approximately 2 million adolescents attempt suicide each year. As the number of visits by adolescents to the ED rises and the availability of outpatient mental health services diminishes, the ED physician must be not only able to stabilize the patient medically, but also should be comfortable with differentiating organic from psychiatric disease, performing a targeted psychosocial interview, initiating treatment, and arranging for disposition.
Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are frequently encountered in clinical medicine. According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 2.8 million infections with Chlamydia trachomatis and 700,000 infections with Neisseria gonorrhea occur annually in the United States.